Creative Writing Program | Joseph Skibell

FROM A PIT OF DEATH, A SEARCH FOR REDEMPTION

Review of Blessing on the Moon, originally published in the Boston Globe, October 12, 1997

By Ann Patchett

There is a scene in Cormac McCarthy's novel "Suttree" in which Suttree tells an old man who has faced enormous hardship and tragedy that things will get better. McCarthy writes: " 'Im satisfied they caint get no worse,' he said. But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didnt say so."

In his brilliant first novel, "A Blessing on the Moon," Joseph Skibell shows us how the Holocaust was only the beginning of the suffering for the Jewish people. The story opens as Chaim Skibelski, who has been shot through the head and back by Nazis, miraculously pulls himself out of a mass grave and runs to his Polish village. It is only when he tries to speak to the gentiles moving into his house that he realizes he is dead.

In some ways, "A Blessing on the Moon'' is structured like an adventure novel, in which our hero struggles through one impossible set of circumstances only to be cast into another just as treacherous. While he waits for the World to Come, he is left to contend with the world around him. First there are the Poles: ``From all corners, their monstrous breathing rises and falls, vibrating through throats so thickened with sleep, it sounds like a mass drowning.'' The only person in the house who can see him is young Ola, whose tuberculosis has put her on a fast course with her own death. Death, in fact or in anticipation, gives these characters a mutual tenderness. But soon enough Ola is gone in a full-blown Catholic ascension, and Chaim sets off to wander again.

If Chaim is Dante, sent down to pick his way through hell, then his Virgil is his Rebbe, whom death has turned into a crow. Not always present, but always straightforward and comforting, the Rebbe guides Chaim while letting him suffer his horrible fate. And while Chaim will at points on his journey doubt the love and the wisdom of God, he never for a moment doubts his loving Rebbe flapping over head. Together they return to the mass grave, where they collect the other mangled living-dead Jews and guide them into the bitter cold. The corpses continue to suffer. They bleed and experience all natures of pain. They long for comfort. The only thing they cannot long for is death. "Only we Jews," Chaim thinks, "seem destined to haunt this long continent, wandering its lengths, until God, in His wisdom, decrees otherwise." In one of the best scenes in the book, Chaim is accosted by the Nazi who shot him, only to discover that the soldier too is dead, having been beheaded by a peasant. Chaim becomes temporarily responsible for this whining and demanding head, and finds, much to his dismay, that he can't even truly hate this man who has taken everything from him.

While an author's note explains that Joseph Skibell lost 18 family members in the Holocaust, this book is in no way a memoir. It is a work of profound imagination, exemplifying the role fiction can play in life, the possibility that through imagination we can both heal and pay homage. Not only has Joseph Skibell not turned away from horror, he has mined it, explored it, and made it his own. From the book's unrelenting gruesomeness (at times there is a "Night of the Living Dead" atmosphere, with a character walking around holding a lost foot or others smearing their blood against the walls) there springs a lightness and a great sense of humor. There is love and forgiveness between neighbors, a tenderness for family, and a complete inability to sustain anger.

The cruelty and disappointments here are dizzying. When our long-suffering characters are finally given comfort in great bounty, the reader can't help holding her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Which it does. Chaim, who had momentarily found peace and reunion, must face the full weight of his loss yet again. Can the dead be killed twice after all? " 'Jews!' I shout at every floor, unable to stop the lift. 'Jews, where have you gone?' "

Finally, weary beyond measure, Chaim must play his part in the retrieval of the moon, which has been lost since the atrocities of war. It is then, when he has fulfilled the prophecies of the Rebbe, that he is able to make his journey toward peace.

When our reading takes us to imagined worlds, it is best to judge the results not by the questions that occur to us but by the consistency of the answers. We never know why it is that Chaim escapes the pit, or why, again and again, he appears to be the one for whom some exception is made. Skibell writes with such authority that we take it on faith that the dead still sleep but cannot eat, and that they are seen by some and not by others. The only troubling element is why Chaim cannot leave for the World to Come until the moon is rehung in the sky. What the reader thought at first was merely a folk tale for children ultimately introduces the question of responsibility for the Jews that warrants explanation. It was the only point in this extremely daring book that gives a reader pause. Skibell has given us an astonishing first novel. He has turned the full light of his extraordinary talent and vision on one of history's darkest moments and taught us to see it again.

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