Book Notices | The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid

Yishai Sarid, The Memory Monster

Amazon   This short book is written in the first person and purports to be a letter written by the unnamed narrator to his boss, the chairman of the board of Yad Vashem, explaining "what happened there." We don't find out what event he's alluding to until the very end of the book. In seeking to explain it, the narrator provides an account of pretty much his whole adult working life, and in quite a lot of detail. He is trained as a historian and wrote the book, literally, on the Nazis' methods of execution in the Polish camps. He also regularly leads tours of the camps for students and other groups. Initially detached from the subject, he becomes increasingly unhinged by the emotional toll his career takes on him, and he is plagued by the question of what sort of Jew he would have been had he lived through the Shoah. I'm not sure that I really understand the book's ending, but my guess is that "what happened there" is a sort of answer to that question for him.