HELL IS FOR CHILDREN<\/span>: 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.<\/p>\n Janos Nyiri\u2019s Battlefields and Playgrounds<\/span> is one of the best novels I\u2019ve read in a long time. <\/p>\n 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\u2019t read that much about the Holocaust. I\u2019ve read both of my grandfather\u2019s books<\/a> (The Uses of Adversity<\/span>, and also The Pavement of Hell<\/span> which I recommend highly\u2013and WHOA, Amazon says there\u2019s one about the Warsaw Uprising, which I need<\/span> and am ordering RIGHT NOW) and a few other things e.g. Maus<\/span> and Jane Yolen\u2019s novel Briar Rose<\/span>. 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\u2013a sense that Jews needed to ensure that their children didn\u2019t 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<\/a><\/span> or The Power of Light<\/a><\/span>, I didn\u2019t seek out Holocaust narratives or feel especially connected to them. I didn\u2019t think about which of the neighbors I could trust to hide me. I\u2019m conflicted about whether that\u2019s 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\u2019t really understand Jewish life unless you acknowledge it, but at the same time obviously Judaism is not actually<\/span> defined by other people\u2019s 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\u2019s just to say that I don\u2019t really know what\u2019s typical for a \u201cHolocaust novel.\u201d All I know is that I\u2019ve never read one like this.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s-eye perspective felt completely<\/span> real. Joszka is rarely able to view things from other people\u2019s perspectives. That protects him from much of the horror around him\u2013but not all of it.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t allowed to forget that, but it isn\u2019t until very late in the novel that we even see one corpse, let alone a sense of the total devastation which the novel\u2019s denouement reveals.<\/p>\n In the final third or so of the novel theology finally rears its ugly head. There\u2019s an amazing chapter in which Joszka\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n This book is amazingly compelling. It\u2019s actually fun to read for a long time, since even as the readers\u2019 dread never abates we\u2019re still mostly following Joszka\u2019s attempts to manipulate all the adults around him; and when it stops being fun, it starts being painfully suspenseful. I can\u2019t recommend this highly enough.<\/p>\n The notes at the end are in large part a compendium of Catholics Choosing Hell, so there\u2019s that, also.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s Battlefields and Playgrounds is one of the best novels I\u2019ve read in a long time. Personal digression, included because it might be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n