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Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander – review

This article is more than 12 years old
A satire that imagines an elderly Anne Frank, alive and well and living in the attic of an American Jewish family, stays hilariously on the right side of bad taste

It would have been interesting to have been a fly on the wall when Shalom Auslander pitched the idea for his latest book to his agent. One imagines the conversation would have gone something like this:

"I want to write about the Holocaust."

"Great. That sells."

"About Anne Frank."

"Even better."

"A guy discovers her living in his attic. She's a bitter old woman who swears, eats dead birds and defecates down air vents."

Silence.

The brilliance of Hope: A Tragedy is that it pulls off this potentially offensive conceptual feat with devastating aplomb. More than that, Auslander has written one of the funniest books of the last decade: a raging, hilarious polemic on the inescapability of history and the ambiguous nature of hope.

The protagonist is Solomon Kugel, a young Jewish professional who yearns for nothing more than to protect his only child, three-year-old Jonah, from all the awful things that could happen to him. To this end, Kugel moves his family – including his wife Bree and his ageing mother – out of New York to a picturesque farmhouse in the rural town of Stockton. There is a local arsonist on the loose but otherwise Stockton is "famous for nothing". 

The nothingness appeals because Kugel is a man suffocated by history. His childhood was overshadowed by the constant threat of tragedy, encouraged by his mother who, despite being born in Brooklyn in 1946, imagines she is a survivor of the concentration camps. When a young Kugel asks why his mother has placed a lampshade beside him on the bed, she replies: "That's your grandfather." When he protests that it says "Made in Taiwan," his mother snaps: "Well, they're not going to write Made in Buchenwald, are they?"

Kugel's mother is the source of much of the novel's blackest humour. In the farmhouse, she wakes up screaming every morning: "She had done so ever since reading that this was common behaviour among survivors of the Holocaust." When Kugel recalls a trip the two of them made to a concentration camp when he was a teenager, he remembers his mother's ire when he mistakenly smiled while posing for a photo by the gas ovens. "You ruined the whole concentration camp for me, you know that?"

Much of this runs the risk of being tasteless but Auslander is adept at treading the line between humour and offensiveness. The target of his satire is not the Holocaust itself but the mawkish self-absorption of those who use it for their own ends, who relish the hierarchy of victimhood rather than cherishing the triumph of survival.

The living, breathing Anne Frank stands in metaphorical opposition to Kugel's mother: here is a survivor who cannot admit that she is still alive in case it debunks the powerful myth that she unwittingly created. After 60 years in hiding, Anne Frank is trapped in Kugel's attic by her own reputation. She spends her nights typing an endless manuscript and repeatedly reminds Kugel of her impressive sales figures. "Thirty-two million copies," she screams as he attempts to coax her out of the attic. "That's nothing to sneeze at!"

The irony is that Kugel becomes so obsessed with protecting Anne Frank that he forgets to look after his own family. Jonah – despite being the reason for moving to the country – makes only brief appearances. Bree moves out after Kugel refuses to evict the old lady from the attic.

So it is that Kugel becomes crushed by the weight of his own cultural baggage. He remains caught between the desire to make things better and the belief that disaster lurks behind every street corner (throughout the novel, Kugel jots down possible "last words" in a special notebook so that, when the time comes, he will be ready with the appropriate bon mots).

His existential plight is represented in the form of two supporting characters. Kugel's therapist, Professor Jove, insists that hope is a delusion and causes only unhappiness. On the other side is Kugel's brother-in-law, Pinkus, an academic who believes the world is becoming "more humane, more caring, less violent".

Kugel seems to have more sympathy with the former: his family might disintegrate around him, he might have an unwanted tenant in the attic, his house might burn down, but at least he can always rely on hopelessness to be his faithful companion. It is to Auslander's credit that he riffs expertly on the human condition while writing a book that is also uproariously funny.

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