Review: ‘Hope: A Tragedy’ by Shalom Auslander

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Updated: March 6, 2012 8:10AM

Shalom Auslander’s two previous books, the story collection Beware of God and his memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, rely for their unsparing comedy and narrative energy on the author’s Orthodox Jewish background and his struggle to escape its oppressive constraints.

Now, presumably liberated from that parochial world, his first novel, Hope: A Tragedy, unfolds from the perspective of an openly secular Jew, Solomon Kugel, who relocates from Brooklyn with his wife and 3-year-old son to a farmhouse in rural Stockton, a village “unencumbered by history.” Predictably, he drags his history along, not only in the form of his suffocating anxieties but also in the person of his supposedly dying mother, a fifth-generation American Jew whose Holocaust-survivor delusions with their standard props (grandfather the lampshade, great-grandmother the bar of soap) he tolerates and even supports.

Soon after the family settles into its new home, a foul smell as well as a persistent tapping sound leads Kugel to the attic, where he discovers none other than Anne Frank. It turns out that this most-celebrated Holocaust victim didn’t die as the world had assumed, but has passed the 60-plus years since the end of the war hiding in attics, where, naturally, she feels most comfortable, typing her novel. (Considering the
32 million copies her Diary sold, it’s a hard act to follow.)

As all this historic sewage spills over within the walls of Kugel’s new home, outside the menacing future looms in the shape of an arsonist on the loose in Stockton, burning down one farmhouse after another, inexorably zeroing in on Kugel and his family.

The attic at the top of the house, like the head at the top of the body, is where all the accumulated junk is stored. For Kugel, Anne Frank in his attic represents the dumping ground for his worst fears: his child’s fragility, the certainty of disaster. Given Auslander’s irreverent, overwrought, regressive dark comedy, the attic also becomes the launching pad for one of several riffs weaving through the novel. It’s where you hide when the inevitable worst-case scenario hits: the next Holocaust.

Tova Reich, whose most recent novel is My Holocaust, wrote this review for the Washington Post.