Creative Writing Program | Joseph Skibell

Review of Blessing on the Moon, originally published in The Houston Chronicle

Poetic debut defines Holocaust

By Richard Levy

A BLESSING ON THE MOON. By Joseph Skibell. Algonquin Books, $21.95.

THIS book proves once again that T.W. Adorno was wrong. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, admonished the outspoken philosopher. Although A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell is fiction, it is wonderfully poetic, and -- if one may be permitted such enthusiasm -- it is a wonderful Holocaust novel.

Adorno's grief was well-meant, of course, but to silence aesthetic response to anything -- even something as horrifying and incomprehensible as the Holocaust -- is the greater barbarism.

Primo Levi proved this to the world soon after the war with his chilling, precise and moving memoir, Survival in Auschwitz. Others have given us new perspectives: Elie Wiesel, Thomas Keneally (author of Schindler's List), the poet Paul Celan and Houston's own Daniel Stern.

But -- and here's where Adorno does have a point -- so much of what is committed to print and celluloid about the Holocaust is so sentimental and sanctimonious that it dishonors the memory of the lost. By contrast, A Blessing on the Moon is a fresh, imaginative novel of the fantastic that yields a guilty pleasure; it is a hugely enjoyable read.

Blessing begins with the murder of a Jewish community in a Polish village. "They rounded us up, took us out to the forests. We stood there, shivering, like trees in uneven rows, and one by one we fell."

But the narrator, one of the murdered, 60-year-old lumber merchant and patriarch Chaim Skibelski (who, we know from the dedication, is the author's great-grandfather), is not defeated by death: "I was lying in a pit with all my neighbors, true, but I was ecstatic. I felt lighter than ever before in my life. It was all I could do not to giggle."

Moments later, he climbs out of the grave, returns to the village and witnesses "peasants" moving into his house. He pleads with them, and "they crossed themselves and shuddered," but they do not hear him.

And I realized I was dead. I was dead. But why was I not in the World to Come?

"Perhaps this is the World to Come."

The words came from a black crow sitting in an empty tree.

"Rebbe," I said. I recognized the voice as belonging to our beloved Rabbi. "How can that be?" I said. "Strangers are moving into my house. You yourself are a crow. How is it possible this is the World to Come?"

"Be grateful," he squawked. "Rejoice in your portion."

And he flew away.

So begins Skibelski's journey. At times, this afterlife intersects with the world of the living, but most of the time it is a landscape of pure imagination held together by the logic of the narrator's sensible, kind, occasionally grumpy, but always unruffled voice.

"[A]fter all," Skibelski says during one particularly ironic episode near the end of the book, "if I have learned anything since my death, it is that one must never grow accustomed to the seeming laws of one's existence, for as soon as one does, they are certain to change. ... "

The book reads as if the great Mexican novel of death, Juan Rulfo's Pedro P‡ramo, in which a man travels back to the land of the dead to visit his infamous father, had been retold by Isaac Bashevis Singer, with touches of Franz Kafka and Marx (Groucho, that is) thrown in for good measure.

It's a compelling tour de force, a surreal but thoroughly accessible page-turner. And in the course of its adventures, the story touches on Polish collaboration and guilt, the bitter divisions within even the smallest Jewish community, the proper response to evil, and such metaphysical matters as heaven and the occasional absurdity of obedience to divine decree.

Like any good picaresque novel, the only thing predictable about Blessing is its unpredictability. There is, for example, an erotic tinge to the relationship between Skibelski and Ola, the teen-age daughter of the Polish family that occupies the Skibelski home. She is the only member of the family who can see, hear and speak with Skibelski.

In her grief over the dead Jews, she starves herself to death. After days of comforting her with cool cloths, stories and soothing words, Skibelski watches her ascend to heaven in a scene filled with sardonic observations -- "That fat mamma's boy with the scraggly beard and the blotchy red face? This nebbish is their god?" -- and religious clichŽs -- "Small, winged babies pull at the light-filled clouds, closing them like a curtain."

The following afternoon, Skibelski is drunk and bitter. "Oh, but the misery of watching her ascend to the Heavens in a fiery chariot, accompanied by her false gods, those idolatrous abominations, while our God, the One True God, has left me neglected here below, answering my pleas with his stony, implacable silence!"

The echo of the skepticism that has dominated Jewish religious thought since the Holocaust is unmistakable.

Later in the book, the Rebbe/crow miraculously brings back to "life" the rest of the murdered Jews from their mass grave. Skibelski is reunited with his old friend, Reb Elimelech, and the tables are turned: Skibelski is accused of desertion.

Elimelech, his decomposing flesh stinking, approaches Skibelski when the rest of the corpses are asleep. After much comic shtick stressing the length and depth of their friendship, he asks: "Then why did you leave me in the pit? ... how could you just leave us there?" The question smites Skibelski. He cannot adequately respond, and his guilt is overwhelming.

These moments, when the novel transcends its comic or absurd or grotesque surface, bring into focus some of the central issues of the Holocaust -- the guilt of survivors, the shaking of faith -- with startling clarity.

Another example: At one point Skibelski is captured by a soldier who threatens to "kill him again." Skibelski angrily jams the gun against the soldier's chest, and the soldier's head falls off. The man's body immediately wanders away, and after an abusive confrontation, the head becomes Skibelski's prisoner -- or is it vice versa?

Carrying the head under his arm "like a pumpkin," he is forced to listen to a whiny life story. This Nazi, it turns out, was a music student: "If it weren't for you ... I'd still be at the conservatory, working on my compositions ... Let's just say I've been denied everything, because of you, including a heroic death."

Skibelski's tolerance is saintly. After the head confesses to being his killer, Skibelski asks, "What do you want from me?"

"I need to be forgiven, Herr Jude. Forgive me. Won't you?"

Skibelski's response is chilling. "Little head, ... when you killed me, you took everything. My home, my wife, my children. Must you have my forgiveness as well?"

Skibell, like his narrator, doesn't let the inadequacy of the answers stop him from asking the same sorts of questions in imaginative and provocative ways. It is particularly impressive that he captures cadences of thought and speech typical of Eastern European Jews, as readers of Singer and Shalom Alechem will confirm.

A startling debut -- this is Skibell's first novel -- and a welcome addition to the canon of Holocaust literature, A Blessing on the Moon deserves a long and happy life.

Rich Levy is executive director of Inprint Inc., a nonprofit organization that fosters the literary arts in Houston.

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