Development Site - Changes here will not affect the live (production) site.

What's Wrong with Martin Amis's New Holocaust Novel?

More than two decades ago, Martin Amis gave us Time’s Arrow, a novel told from the perspective of a Nazi official who served at Auschwitz. Now he has returned to the death camp with Zone of Interest, a fictional account, partly seen through the eyes of a Jewish prisoner, of a love affair involving a camp functionary and the camp commandant’s wife. The novel showcases Amis’s lavish literary talents, writes Ruth Franklin, especially for satire and parody, but fails to come to terms with the gravity of its subject matter—partly because it labors in the shadow of an entire library of previous fiction and memoirs, but partly for more telling reasons:

Amis is one of the most inventive users of language currently at work in English—his sentences cannot help crackling—as well as a uniquely talented satirist. But when it comes to the deeper problems of the Nazi pathology that gave rise to the jargon he so brilliantly parodies, he does not have much to offer. . . . A novel that raises [possibly unanswerable questions] should at least make an attempt at grappling with them.

Read more at New York Times

More about: Auschwitz, Holocaust fiction, Literature, Martin Amis

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic