The Holocaust Runner - Paperback

The Holocaust Runner - meet an average guy, a middle-aged American jogger, who travels to Berlin to run around the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. And, while running, he' s there to recite the names of the dead., especially those who have no family to mourn them.

That's it! And yet, of course, stuff begins to happen. The dead begin to speak to him, he to them, and the local polizei are suspicious, as are the neo-Nazis.

Yet the novel is anything but a straight-told tale. It is a post-modern work of literary fiction -set in today's Berlin, New York City, or any city in any country where the troubled past is alive in the present. It weaves together, in one concise and compelling innovative form, our entire cultural obsession with the Holocaust and more generally how we use or abuse the past, especially its worst human tragedies. It is also particularly timely given the rise of antisemitism and acts of violence today. And somehow the novel also has a sense of humor!

I think in this book I've brought together a kind of summa of my work life as a writer at Jewish institutions, museums, and libraries over the years; as a novelist; and for the past 20 years as a journalist. There are also my concerns - call them obsessions - with history, World War Two, God, doubt and faith, meditation and memory, and the unforgiving mystery of the evanescence and meaning of Time itself.

In short, I tried to write a book about someone who wants to do more than remember; that is, about someone who doesn't trust how we have been taught to remember. Such tools, he feels, are insufficient for the challenge of the present moment. He turns his life over to the goal of doing far more than write a history or build a museum or raise a marble memorial, or say a kaddish. It's a book about a character who wants to do something all of us are desperate to do when we lose someone we love: we want to find a way to rescue the dead.

When I began writing, mainly poetry, back in 1968, I came across a poem by David Ignatow entitled "Rescue the Dead." I think without my being quite conscious of it The Holocaust Runner was born in me there and then; it just took a while, about a lifetime, for it to emerge. The last two stanzas are:

To live is to sign your name,

is to ignore the dead,

is to carry a wallet

and shake hands.

To love is to be a fish.

My boat wallows in the sea.

You who are free,

rescue the dead

Of course there are other influences whose brew includes Kafka, Mel Brooks, Joseph Conrad, and a love for unreliable narrators such as Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita, Fitzgerald's Nick in The Great Gatsby, and especially Mario Vargas Llosa's storytellers in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The best unbelievable narrators, of course, tell at least some truths some of the time. And when something is, to begin with, so horrible you don't want to acknowledge human beings did that to each other, maybe the imagination, that is, fiction -with its unique ability to time-travel and with the intimacy of the driver/narrator whispering in your ear - perhaps that is the best way to travel to places we might not be able otherwise to reach. I hope so.