The Memory Monster

The narrator of Yishai Sarid’s powerful novella is a young Israeli Holocaust scholar who never intended to become one. Or to guide Israeli high school students to the Nazi death camps in Poland. He did love history, but just wanted to live a quiet life of a historian, avoiding research into his own people’s suffering. However, practical considerations and the need to make a living – he had in the meantime married and fathered a son – led him to write his doctoral thesis on the death camps and to start working as a guide, first at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem and then at the camps themselves. He came to see his job as a way to pass on the memory of the Holocaust, and thought he was immune to the stress involved. But memory became a monster – he slowly became addicted to his occupation, renting an apartment in Warsaw and staying away from home for long periods of time. His son, his wife told him, is being bullied by his preschool peers. He is a gentle child, one who does not know how to hit back and defend himself.

Sarid’s novella is written as a report by the narrator to his superior in Jerusalem, in which he tries to explain a violent and embarrassing incident at a death camp. In this incident, he lost his temper and hit a German movie director who was also trying to address the memory that Germans and Jews have in common, and was making a film on the extermination of the Jews. Ranging beyond pure report, the narrator describes himself, his life story and his mental deterioration. He raises ethical questions about the struggle to cope with the memory of the Holocaust; the lessons to be drawn; the connection between the Jews of then and the Israelis of today; the adulation of power, and what turns human beings into killers. He also claims that in the camps the illusion of humanity was wiped out, and that anyone could become a murderer. High culture, refined art, scientific progress – all these are simply a thin veil that cannot protect us.

Named one of 100 Notable Books of 2020 by the New York Times.

Featured in Kirkus’s “6 Novels in Translation to Read Now”.