It’s been 8 months since I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust was published. During that time I was part of a blog tour, queried at least 1,000 individuals, organizations, associations, museums and schools of Jewish studies. I spread the word on FACEBOOK and Linkedin; contacted personal friends and acquaintances. I donate 10 books as a giveaway on Goodreads on a monthly basis, paying for the books out of my pocket, not including the mailing costs to Canada, Great Britain, Australia, France, and Israel. I handed out many copies for reviews and some as gifts to pique interest. I invested at least $4,000 for marketing my book. Submitting my book to 17 literary contests here and abroad which included entrance fees, ranging from $40 to $125, I won the Beverly Hills Book Awards for short stories which is an immense pleasure. I am engaged in August to speak at two venues with the idea of selling a few books. Mentally I am giving myself until next September, which would make it one year since publication, to market the book and then I will stop. I am not through with this book, it will be a constant in my life.
During these past months the heavy breath of Holocaust resistance to my book has blown across my face. In short, we’ve read enough about the Holocaust; what! another book on the subject; it is too somber and morbid a subject; finally, let us Pontius Pilate the book, wash our hands of it, sight unseen. I can chew and taste the relentless unwillingness to invest time in the subject. There is no fair play in all this, nor can I expect any, as it is one more book I felt I had to write, and one more book not wanted. There is a surfeit of Holocaust books, fiction and non-fiction (Can there ever be?). There is reviewer fatigue about the subject. And there is also a lack of balls to engage the subject. Intellectual and psychological cowardice blows through my computer as bloggers resist, say they “pass,” or simply do not answer (class). Often magazine editors willing to accept the book cannot find reviewers to read it.
The Inquisition was the original blueprint of the Holocaust. Historically we are still examining that period for it hisses, suppurates anti-Semitism and is the template for the Holocaust, 1933 to 1945. It has rightly been argued that the history of Jews has been a series of Holocausts.I recently read a history of Jewish pirates in the Caribbean who waged war against Spain, having been expelled in 1492 and forced to enter another Diaspora. Revenge! The horror stories of Marranos and Conversos, the burning at the stake, autos-da-fe, led Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Benjamin Netanyahu, to write a 1200 page scholarly tome that specifically ascribes Jew hatred at the heart of the Inquisition; in short, it wasn’t the Jew as a non-Christian, it was hatred of the Jew as a people. The concept of limpieza de sangre or purity of blood led directly to the racial theories of Hitler. In a trip to Spain in 2007 I came across a resistance and unwillingness to discuss the Jewish experience in Spain; the odds are that most everyone in Spain, in the nooks and crannies of historical space, had a relative who was Jewish. Perhaps they feel “tainted.”
Since Jews hold memory in high esteem, Netanyahu, centuries later, unearths the real motives for the Inquisition. His book is the last word on the subject.
I am experiencing as a writer a kind of crypto-phenomenon. When I enrolled the book for a tour there were bloggers who resisted displaying the book on their sites. All this was subtly implied. The book is a “downer.” All this reaffirms, without rancor, my general assessment about the species, knowing full well the book would not be “popular.”And what is that assessment: Thou Shalt Not Know. It seems to me that the Holocaust is a litmus test for the mass of men. It reminds them of the continuing rolling reverberation of what each of us is capable of doing. The human race is not capable of remediation, never was, never is, and never will be. Which brings me back to me and why I wrote this book.
I wrote it for the same reason a prisoner etches dates and comments on his cell wall, announcing his existence. I will forever announce that I am a Jew.
