The Holocaust Kid
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
A major work of autobiographical fiction by a second generation Holocaust writer--funny, erotic, irreverent, and deeply moving.
Zosha Palovsky was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, but she has grown up in Brooklyn and in Washington Heights, joined a Latina gang, and refused to attend a yeshiva. She’s a rebel, outspoken, sexually liberated, and determined to live her own life, free of her parents’ past. Yet, as daring and defiant as she is, Zosha cannot escape. Her entire life is touched by the war.
She has dreams of Auschwitz, falls in love with “her own private Nazi,” and has an affair with a kinky Holocaust scholar. Obsessed with events that took place before her birth, she becomes a writer. By day she summons a "shlock muse in rhinestone harlequin glasses, cabana pants, and spiked heels" to write Elizabeth Taylor stories for the readers of Movie Screen magazine and, by night, writes "blood-eyed poems" about the Holocaust. Her parents wonder: Why can’t she get married like a normal person? How are they to understand their American daughter?
With unflinching honesty and wild humor, Sonia Pilcer follows the Holocaust legacy as it courses through lust and desire, guilt and fear, and unexpected joy, revealing the emotional depths beneath the quest to free oneself from an ever-present past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's not easy being "2G" Second Generation, the child of Holocaust survivors as Zosha, Pilcer's alter ego, tells us in this avowedly autobiographical collection. "While the survivors seem to have the ability to go on with their lives," she writes, "it is their children who spend much of their time, not to mention money, talking to Ph.D.s and MSWs." The 15 stories collected here seek to explore this paradox, though their approach feels a bit simplistic. Zosha, whose parents lived through Auschwitz and labor camps, escaping when she was one year old, chafes under the burden of remembering the Holocaust, even as she feels that it "was all mine... my private cache of suffering and obsession." Pilcer (Teen Angel; Little Darlings) has settled on an important topic, but she works it with a limited palette one involving mostly bitterness, irony and rather cartoonish depictions of supporting characters. In "Remembering 6,000,000" she scorns the New York Jews who open their synagogues for Holocaust Remembrance Day, and in "The Big H" she despises the Christian academics hosting an interfaith Holocaust conference. Her lovers Ludwig, who has a neo-Nazi past, and Uly, a Jewish professor who wears jackboots and salutes "Kraut beer" seem chosen mostly for their ironic value. "Paskudnyak" finds Zosha enraging her parents in the '60s by joining a Latina gang; her wild ways prompt her father to shout, "I should have died in the camps." This collection seems more like a cry for her parents' attention and understanding than a thoughtful examination of their difficult legacy. Just as Holocaust piety can turn into schtick, so can Holocaust irreverence: too often, that's what happens here.
