Book Review

I just finished a quick but well-written book over the weekend that I thought I would recommend to my readers. The title is Not Me by Michael Lavigne. The story is told from the vantage point of Michael, a middle-aged Jewish comedian, separated from his wife and son, and tending to his dying father. His father, who has always presented himself as a Holocaust survivor, hands Michael a box of journals which contain some writings with some pretty stunning clues as to the man's wartime activities, which leaves Michael struggling to connect the dots as to the truth about his father's past. The journals recount the story of a Nazi accountant who worked in a concentration camp, and then manages to escape the Allies at the end of the war by impersonating a Jewish Holocaust survivor and emigrating to what was then Palestine. The narrative is complicated by the question of whether the journals are works of fiction, or his father's actual memoirs of his experiences during the wartime years, and the story works through the confusion from the son's perspective nicely. What's interesting is how the author, in telling the story, seems to blur the line between victim and perpetrator until the reader's sympathies become a bit mixed up - and I am quite sure that that is not entirely a good thing when it comes to the subject matter at hand. Though one certainly feels some sympathies toward the father in the novel, and the author certainly works hard to make the point that there is a large gray area between what's "right" and what's "wrong", as well as how subjective the concept of identity can be, it was hard for me to see the father as having been an altruistic character, despite him being portrayed as being a devout Jew and having been involved in many Jewish causes in later life. That said, I would obviously never suggest that every literary work has to have some sort of moral message - so the book is still worth a read even if I can't empathize with some of the characters as the author seems to expect us to. The book also includes some interesting tensions between three generations' worth of father-son relationships.

The book actually reminded me of a different book I had recently read, Those Who Save Us, which tells a similar story of a grown child uncovering some long-buried secrets regarding a parent's wartime activities - in this case, a daughter about a mother. In terms of the actual secrets being uncovered, the author of this book does not have to work as hard to blur the line between victim and perpetrator - the mother of the main character is clearly a victim, despite her wartime activities in which she has an affair with a Nazi officer out of self-preservation - as well as a hero - in her own right, as compared to the father in Not Me, who I cannot characterize as showing any heroism throughout the book. Also, in Those Who Save Us, though the mother is portrayed as a sympathetic character, there is no attempt whatsoever to mitigate the evil in the portrayal of any Nazi sympathizers or Nazis proper, as there is in the pages of Not Me.

All in all, both books are worth picking up, though I wouldn't recommend reading them back-to-back, as the similarity in themes might get a bit repetitive.

If anyone has read either/both of these books and would like to treat this thread as an impromptu book-club meeting, feel free. I would be happy to join in.