Book Alert / Our Holocaust

Our Holocaust by Amir Gutfreund, Toby Press '06, $24.95, 407 pages, ISBN #1-59264-139-3.

Writing about a family struggling to survive during the Holocaust, the author writes that the disappearance of family members as a result of the Nazi purge caused relationships to be governed by what he calls the "Law of Compression," in which "tenuous connections turned friends into uncles, cousins and grandparents." Here's a sample of Gutfreund's graceful writing:

"Grandpa used to say, 'People have to die of something,' and refused to donate to the war against cancer, the war against traffic accidents, or any other war. To avoid being considered stingy, he would occasionally burst into exemplary displays of tremendous generosity. He put on these shows with such proficiency that if not for us, his relatives, no one would have known the simple truth: He was a miser.

"In his home, parsimony was the law of the land. he zealously collected empty bottles for their deposits, and when one of them broke he glued it back together with great artistry. Like a cuckoo, he tossed his shirts into other people's laundry hampers, staging stains when necessary. He had a wonderful ability to catch colds in tandem with us, so he could take our cough syrup and conserve his own. He declared the colds over prematurely, proclaiming, 'We're better now!' and stockpiled the remaining antibiotics. He kept a bottle of liquid soap in his bathroom, and whenever the soap level dropped below a finger's width he watered it down in an endless process that ultimately produced a bottle of water convinced it was soap. We were happy, at times, to remind ourselves that he wasn't even our real grandfather."

This is the first novel for Gutfreund, who was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1963 and lives in the Galilee.