Is it possible to squeeze the sleaze out of a particularly unsavory crime by using its proceeds to finance something positive? How big a role should that most irksome Jewish invention – the conscience – play in our lives? These two questions dangle over Max’s Diamonds like a literary sword of Damocles.
And something else hovers over Jay Greenfield’s novel from the first page to the last – the Holocaust and the guilt concerning the Shoah felt by many Jews.
That guilt comes from their knowledge that, for some inexplicable reason, while their brothers and sisters suffered the unbearable in hellholes like Auschwitz, they were safe in their mothers’ loving arms in London or Los Angeles, or somewhere in the ether waiting to be born.
Read More