The Memory Monster | 
pickThe narrator is a historian specialised in the Shoa and a tour guide in the extermination camps in Poland whose initial approach to his job is intellectual and academic but as the book progresses the weight of the horror he recounts every day changes him. Written in epistolary form, the novel is filled with historical events, raises questions that are relevant today and is just … heartbreaking.
pickThe Memory Monster is a cautionary tale of how we can forget and commend those whose hatred was so vile that to some they were heroes.
Read my review here: https://sandralynnbrower.blogspot.com/
This book has some seriously mixed up stuff in it.
Israeli HS students touring the remnants of the Concentration Camps.
After 1st ellipses— “they hated the Polish much more. When we walked around the streets in cities and villages, whenever we met the local population, they would mutter words of hatred at them, about the pogroms they had committed, their collaboration, their anti-semitism.”
& not the Germans who did the torturing & killing?
Have you read The Memory Monster yet?? This book makes you think hard about how the past can consume you, and how people make decisions to which side they take in history.
This book reminds me in someways of the movie The Wave (1981) in that you can just go too far in unconsciously taking sides for good or bad.
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pickAn Israeli with a PhD in Holocaust History and unable to find a tenured position finds himself spending more and more time in Poland giving tours of the camps. As his popularity as a guide rises, he grapples with what carrying these memories mean. It‘s an intense, controversial, timely read. Highly recommended.
Eeking out a last bit of daylight reading with this beautifully written book.
