HELL IS FOR CHILDREN: Because my life is one giant roulette wheel and I am the shiny ball, I decided to start my Eastertide by reading a 500-page Hungarian Holocaust novel.

Janos Nyiri’s Battlefields and Playgrounds is one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

Personal digression, included because it might be of interest, but skip this if you want to know about why the book is so powerful: I admit that I actually haven’t read that much about the Holocaust. I’ve read both of my grandfather’s books (The Uses of Adversity, and also The Pavement of Hell which I recommend highly–and WHOA, Amazon says there’s one about the Warsaw Uprising, which I need and am ordering RIGHT NOW) and a few other things e.g. Maus and Jane Yolen’s novel Briar Rose. But I have the impression, which could be wrong, that when I was growing up there was a concerted movement within American Jewry to move away from focusing on the Holocaust–a sense that Jews needed to ensure that their children didn’t see Judaism as defined by attempted genocide. So while I felt really strong personal connections to the depictions of Jewish life in e.g. Stories My Grandfather Should Have Told Me or The Power of Light, I didn’t seek out Holocaust narratives or feel especially connected to them. I didn’t think about which of the neighbors I could trust to hide me. I’m conflicted about whether that’s the best way to address the Holocaust for Jewish children; hatred of the Jews is intense and horrific and longstanding enough that I do think you don’t really understand Jewish life unless you acknowledge it, but at the same time obviously Judaism is not actually defined by other people’s reactions to Jews, and the Book of Esther is not the only book. To the extent that this whole digression is relevant to Nyiri, it’s just to say that I don’t really know what’s typical for a “Holocaust novel.” All I know is that I’ve never read one like this.

The protagonist is a fierce, tough, batteringly self-assured little boy. Seriously, he calls his mother a whore! (Because she takes up with a Gentile after divorcing his father.) He is ferocious and completely convinced of the rightness of his own perspective. The child’s-eye perspective felt completely real. Joszka is rarely able to view things from other people’s perspectives. That protects him from much of the horror around him–but not all of it.

This is also a Holocaust novel where the actual devastation of the Jewish people takes place off-screen for almost the entire time. The hell-tide is creeping nearer and nearer to his family every moment, and the reader isn’t allowed to forget that, but it isn’t until very late in the novel that we even see one corpse, let alone a sense of the total devastation which the novel’s denouement reveals.

In the final third or so of the novel theology finally rears its ugly head. There’s an amazing chapter in which Joszka’s profligate, almost entirely absent father (and presumably you can write your own theological parallels there) returns to talk with him about God, and argues that the Jewish way of relating to God differs from the Christian in that the Christian believes in total unconditional surrender. Thus Christianity is a slave morality, and Christians are psychologically trained to view the world in terms of slaves and masters. So they think they are God’s slaves and the Jews are theirs. Judaism by contrast, he argues, is a wrestling with God and a treaty with Him. When God blesses the Jews, the Jews can trust Him enough to bless Him back. The novel’s characters really vividly portray both the degree to which this is a true portrait of Christianity, and the degree to which this is a false portrait of Judaism. I was reminded of The Trial of God.

This book is amazingly compelling. It’s actually fun to read for a long time, since even as the readers’ dread never abates we’re still mostly following Joszka’s attempts to manipulate all the adults around him; and when it stops being fun, it starts being painfully suspenseful. I can’t recommend this highly enough.

The notes at the end are in large part a compendium of Catholics Choosing Hell, so there’s that, also.