The author, or at least the main character in his book, is obsessed with a woman and spends most of the book whining about her.
By AARON LEIBELA MAN stands atop the concrete blocks of the Holocaust-Mahnmal memorial, many of which have cracks. The book says German Holocaust memorials are insufficient(photo credit: REUTERS)
When I review a book, I feel obliged to read it from cover to cover. That obligation usually becomes a pleasure; not so with The Berlin Woman.Not that author Alan Kaufman can’t write – he is a master of his craft, although I’m not a big fan of Kaufman’s long sentences, which seem to go on forever.But for me, the problem with this book is its content, not style.The author, or at least the main character in his book, is obsessed with a woman and spends most of the book whining about her.Lena is a Ukrainian Jew – at least, Nathan has hooked up with someone who is technically Jewish – but she’s not someone to take home to mom. Romeo and Juliet need not worry about being dethroned by this strange couple.Actually, Lena is married (Hubert) and she has a steady boyfriend (Rolf) when she starts her affair with Nathan. (All the men know about each other.) In addition, she is apparently prepared to ditch her current lovers to sleep with any other man who catches her fancy.Nathan and Lena’s sexual encounters are explicitly described. She is violent with him, abusing him sexually and demeaning him as well.Despite the paucity of affection and her sexual violence, Nathan remains fixated on her.That brings us to Nathan’s other obsession – the Holocaust, antisemitism and Israel. Nathan’s mother is a survivor, who beats him. (The author’s mother is also a survivor, and he served in the IDF. As I was reading, I wondered how much of this novel is autobiographical.)As he wails about missing Lena, he rails against the injustices he sees afflicting the Jewish people and how the perpetrators of the Shoah are the real winners.The Holocaust brought forth many questions, Kaufman writes, but the answer was obvious – “we Jews learned that God is not enough; that without a state, without an army, without a government of our own, we are doomed to certain annihilation.”However, he continues, the Holocaust is being forgotten. It happened so long ago, “it’s practically prehistoric history. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Goering, Heydrich, Himmler – such names carry as much weight as Vlad the Impaler and Attila the Hun. The Left has bemoaned the Holocaust but hated Israel. The Right has supported Israel but hated the Jews.”Nathan is especially cynical about those countries that were home to the Nazis. He notes that “prosperous peace and the leadership of Europe is Germany’s punishment for the Holocaust while the Jew’s reward for surviving the gas chambers is to defend the Jewish state against ceaseless genocidal war.”Berlin’s memorials to the Holocaust, the character states, “commemorate ‘loss’ but not murder, gassing, burning, starvation, slave labor, mass execution, rape, beatings, torture, medical experiments, hanging, butchering with axes and crow bars, mass grave executions and machine gun slaughter. In other words, the chaste memorials are absent the particulars.”Although I find his thoughts about Israel and the Jewish people compelling, I am less convinced by his diatribes against Germany. Almost everyone who committed crimes against the Jewish people has died; I don’t think we should hold their children or grandchildren culpable and should be receptive to their efforts to make amends for their ancestors’ inhumanity.If you’re in the market for a well-written book with some insights into both antisemitism and hatred of Israel and are not bothered by vulgar descriptions of sexual acts and abuse, then The Berlin Woman might be for you.The writer is a former editor at The Jerusalem Post and Washington Jewish Week. His novel, Generations: The Story of a Jewish Family, which spans 1,500 years and three continents, is available online. THE BERLIN WOMANBy Alan KaufmanMandel Vilar Press215 pages; $16.95.
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