Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian is a slap in the face. I started reading this fictional account of the Nazi regime’s demise told through the lives of: an aristocratic German family, a rogue Jewish escapee, a female Jewish prisoner and a few other lesser characters, by chance. As so often is the case with two toddlers in the library, I pick up and scan the reviews on the back of a handful of new reads and pick out the most promising ones. This happened to be the one I chose this last time amongst the pleas of my insistent two-year old to find her books about the moon. The writing is well done, not exactly an “I can’t put this down type of book” (which if you’re looking for one to devour I suggest The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens), but nonetheless sophisticated enough to finish and therein lies the problem.
Throughout the book you’re led on these intertwining epic journies through war-torn countries where reason and logic have been choked by hatred and brutality. These things however are mitigated by simple joys like good food, love and human kindness, though Bohjalian downplays this last bit especially when it comes to anyone treating the Jews humanely. But being a scholar of history that wasn’t what bothered me. What knocked me off my seat was the ending where in one page Mr. bohjalian ruins the whole book. In the prologue, the Jewish sister (Rebekah) of one of the main characters is described shouldering a gun as Israeli soldiers are celebrating their victory over the Egyptians, finding her boyfriend in the crowd to plant a congratulatory kiss. I literally said out loud “Are you serious?!”
Let’s get past the fact that Mr. Bohjalian has jumped two decades in order to tie this story in as well as the improbability that this survivor would be of an age to have a boyfriend (being nearly fifty), but add to this the absurd idea that the state of Israel is some kind of retribution for the Holocaust and you’ve landed yourself right on the most ridiculous authors list. It’s plainly illogical and irresponsible.
On the first count, essentially Bohjahlian is suggesting that ultimately this character Rebekah is triumphant because she has survived the holocaust and lived to not only cheer on another one, but be an actor in it as well?! Does he not see the parallel between the Palestinians who were consequently turned out from their homes in order for Israelis to have homes themselves? Is it lost on this delusional man that the idea of the Jewish state only materialized because of the guilt attempting to be purged by the world for allowing the Nazis to terrorize a whole religious community?
On the second count, your average reader is being brainwashed to make a connection between the state of Israel and the Holocaust without acknowledging the awful truth that the state of Israel actually caused and is implementing another holocaust. If ever there was another Warsaw ghetto in the world it is Gaza and the West Bank. If ever a people were trying to be erased, it is the Palestinians.
There is either a problem with bi-polarity in the Israeli community or some other disease causing them to lament their tragic past while enacting it on another people. It has always perplexed me and continues to perplex me. As Israeli politician Peter Beinart has asserted:
“A few years ago, a journalist reported that Malcolm Hoenlein … had a photo in his conference room of Israeli F15s flying over Auschwitz. It is a photo of a fantasy. Israeli jets never bombed Auschwitz and never will. What they have bombed, in recent years, is the Gaza Strip, a fenced in, hideously overcrowded, desperately poor slum from which terrorist groups sometimes shell Israel. Hoenlein, in other words, has decorated his conference room not with an image of the reality that he helps perpetuate, but with an image of the fantasy he superimposes on that reality.”
It is just as Beinart says, a superimposed fantasy that a lot of the world has bought wholesale. It’s as if pro-Israeli supporters are so guilty and sickened by the Holocaust that they allow Israel to act as it does. What other state could have done what Israel has done to the Palestinians besides the United States without being deemed a terrorist state? To be honest I don’t even want to read the news out of Palestine sometimes because it is so disheartening and depressing. And then I read a book like this where nice German people ignored the rumors and news of the atrocities being committed against their fellow citizens and force myself to face reality. Willful ignorance does not make one any less culpable and I know there should be something more that I can do other than write this post.
Young Palestinians are willing to blow themselves up for the same reasons young Jewish people were willing themselves to survive the Holocaust: to make the world wake up and take note of what happened and is happening. These “terrorists” may not be acting in the most rational fashion, but when you put anyone in a corner, depriving them of the most basic human rights that will most likely cause them to perish quicker anyway, why shouldn’t they try to take you with them?! It is a basic human survival skill.
Bottom line, the Holocaust is one of the sickest, darkest, most horrific pieces of history I have read about, but it doesn’t justify the injustice being done by Israel. Innocent children being gassed in chambers will not be brought back by gassing children on the streets of Gaza. Women who were raped and murdered in Poland will not be given back their dignity by taking away the dignity of Palestinian women. Turning out innocent people from their homes on the West Bank will never return the homes of those European Jews who were turned out from theirs. It’s time to stop the cycle and acknowledge these actions for what they are: insane (acting in the same manner or doing the same thing expecting different results). The result, according to any of the latest news coming out of Gaza, is always the same: debilitating loss.
Jazak Allah-Khairan,
Christen
