The Things We Cannot Say

The novels asks in all but words, how does a contemporary novelist approach the topic of the Final Solution? The sheer horror and unfathomable immorality of the Nazi’s insidious campaign to exterminate the Jews in Europe have for more than 80 years challenged the collective imagination of novelists to record that reality. Save for nonfiction accounts of survivors, fiction struggles to encompass the reality of the Nazi obsession with eradicating an entire people, displacing them from homes and neighborhoods, imprisoning them in brutal work camps, and ultimately legalizing killing them. After all, fiction gifts the messy disorder of real-time experience with the generous logic of plot, the compelling reassurance of cause and effect, the movement toward a dramatic closure that affords tidy insights into the human experience. Only survivors and historians have the right to this story. The Holocaust beggars the imagination of a novelist to impose order and logic on a campaign to dehumanize and systematically torture an entire segment of the human population. Awareness cannot pretend to understanding.

This novel’s chapter-by-chapter shift between the horrors of the Nazi occupation and accounts of a contemporary housewife struggling to get her children to sit down for dinner can seem to trivialize the suffering of those who died in Hitler’s camps.