By Michael Lev

Gefen Publishing House. Hard Cover. 294 pp.

ISBN 978-965-229-408-1. NIS 80

Reviewed by Carl Hoffman

The Holocaust—or more specifically, the seven years between Kristallnacht and the liberation of the concentration camps at the end of World War II—have produced an enormous and diverse array of literature. Beginning, perhaps, with the publication in 1947 of Anne Frank’s Diary, this literature has included histories, diaries and personal memoirs, as well as a growing number of short stories and novels. An early example of the former was Isaiah Spiegel’s A Ghetto Dog, written in Yiddish and included in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s popular 1953 anthology, A Treasury of Yiddish Literature. Among the most famous of the latter are Eli Wiesel’s Night, John Hersey’s The Wall, Leon Uris’ Mila 18, Andre Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just and Leslie Epstein’s The King of the Jews.

Among the very best novels of the Holocaust is the relatively little known The Tree of Life by Chava Rosenfarb. Like Epstein’s book, Rosenfarb’s Tree of Life is a novel of the Lodz Ghetto. And like Epstein’s book, Rosenfarb’s novel is both a chronicle of life in the infamous ghetto as well as an in-depth character study of the head of its German-appointed Judenrat—Herr Älteste der Juden, “the Eldest of the Jews,” Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. But unlike Epstein’s novel—as well as those by Hersey, Uris, Schwarz-Bart and others, Rosenfarb’s book has a powerful attribute that the other novels lack: The Tree of Life’s author was there, in the story’s setting, and forced to serve as an unwilling eyewitness to many of the story’s horrific events. Rosenfarb is thus able to draw on actual recollections of imprisonment in the Lodz Ghetto to lend her work as much power as Eli Wiesel’s groundbreaking novel about Auschwitz.

The same cannot be said of Michael Lev’s novel Sobibor, recently published by Gefen. While valuable as a Holocaust narrative that sheds new light on the infamous Sobibor death camp in Poland, this book is far—very far, from the “masterpiece of historical fiction” the blurb on its dust jacket claims it to be.

Michael Lev achieved a considerable degree of renown as a Yiddish writer in the Soviet Union, at least during those brief periods in which writing anything in Yiddish was politically acceptable. His literary talents in Yiddish may well be the source of many of the problems of this novel. In the book’s introductory essay by Mikhail Krutikov, entitled “Michael Lev, Sobibor, and Soviet Yiddish Culture,” we are told that “Stylistically, Sobibor draws upon different literary traditions, which presents the translator with a formidable challenge.” Unfortunately, it also presents the reader with entirely too many passages that read like this: “…it was now nighttime and one had to be careful of every step. Also, the moon had now disappeared. No one was shooting at her, after all, so why had she so suddenly gone into hiding? Had the clouds taken her prisoner? Where had so many of them come from? And such big black ones…”

Having chosen to make his story subordinate to style, Lev has produced something I had previously thought impossible: a novel about the Holocaust—indeed, one about the Nazis’ most infamous death camps—that is actually boring. It is also tedious, with a disjointed narrative and very limited storytelling skills on the part of the author.

The irony of all of this is that Michael Lev personally experienced the Holocaust, serving as a partisan fighting the Germans in the forests of Poland. Such a resume makes his novel Sobibor particularly disappointing; the reader simply expects more than the writer delivers. True, Lev was not at Sobibor himself; the book is the product of extensive research. For a much better, more compelling chronicle of the conditions there, one would be well advised to get hold of a copy of Dov Freiberg’s memoir, To Survive Sobibor, also published by Gefen and reviewed in the previous issue of ESRA.