I should have said something Monday morning about Tova Reich‘s (left) bizarre appearance in this week’s New York Times Book Review, but frankly I was too stupefied by the long letter—written in the voice of one of her characters—protesting what she called a “wrongheaded and surprisingly ad hominem” review of her latest novel, My Holocaust, and I figured maybe I should wait a few days to see if it was still really as much of a train wreck as I thought it was.
It is. “You should excuse me, Mr. Editor, but where did you find this reviewer of yours?” the fictional Lipman Krakowski leads off. “Does he know something from fiction writing?” (Even without having read the novel, one suddenly understands what David Margolick meant, that “uncomprehending little knee-jerk,” when he observed in that review that “throwing vengeance into the mix could help explain how someone so sophisticated and undoubtedly committed to Jewish memory could write something so rancid and so primitive.”)
And you thought nothing could make Michiko Kakutani‘s flights into literary ventriloquism look good: In just three paragraphs, Reich pushes the stereotype needle so far into the red that a goyishe writer would be accused of anti-Semitic ridicule, and one finds oneself comforted in the knowledge that Krakowski is only a minor character in Reich’s novel, as the prospect of 300+ pages of this grotesque yiddishkeit is enough to make one contemplate applying red-hot pokers to one’s eyes—although Margolick suggests the actual protagonist isn’t much better. Sounds like it’d be safer to stick with one’s copy of Francine Prose‘s A Changed Man for the time being…