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The New York Sun – July 6, 2007 -- The Silent Echo
-- By DIANA FURCHTGOTT-ROTH --
President Ahmadinejad organizes conferences on Holocaust denial,
enriches uranium for the possible production of nuclear weapons, and
threatens the eradication of Israel. Hamas controls Gaza and
promises to destroy the Jewish State. Yet Washington's Holocaust
Memorial Museum Web site features a new interactive feature about
the crisis in Darfur. According to the museum's home page, Crisis in
Darfur is "an unprecedented online mapping initiative from the
Museum and Google Earth, lets you visualize, better understand, and
respond to the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur." The Web site
also features President Bush's April 2007 speech at the museum,
almost three-quarters of which was devoted to Darfur. The president
declared, "As we continue to pressure the government of Sudan to
meet its commitments, we will continue our engagement...
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The Atlantic Magazine -- July/August 2007 -- My Holocaust, TOVA REICH. HarperCollins, $24.95, (336p) ISBN
978-0-06-117345-5 --
In this merciless satire on the American glorification and
commodification of victimhood (the first chapter of which appeared
in this magazine), every group vies for the distinction of having
suffered the most. As one of the characters (the president of
Holocaust Connections Inc.; slogan: “Make Your Cause a Holocaust”)
observes, “Everyone wants a piece of the Holocaust pie.” Reich,
whose...
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Bookmarks Magazine – June 2007 -- My Holocaust, TOVA REICH. HarperCollins, $24.95, (336p) ISBN
978-0-06-117345-5 --
More than 70 years later, most writers still tread softly when it
comes to the six million Jews (and countless others) who died at the
hands of the Nazis. My Holocaust is a totally different breed. A
shocking, brave satire, the novel digs into those who, in the name
of avenging six million deaths, commodify tragedy. Despite her
absurd, offensive characters (including a jihad terrorist who gets
co-opted by a rabbi), Tova Reich never trivializes the Holocaust:
indeed, by presenting the outlandishness...
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Christian Science Monitor – May 29, 2007 -- An
acerbic look at the Holocaust industry -- In 'My Holocaust,'
Tova Reich skewers those who merchandise suffering. -- By Tom A.
Peter --
Can any one group lay claim to the Holocaust? Though its victims
were primarily Jews, does that mean that Jewish suffering was so
great that it trumped that of others killed in the Holocaust, such
as Poles, Gypsies, and homosexuals? Does the genocide define the
Jewish identity? Or, speaking more broadly, was the destruction of
the Jewish population so great that the Holocaust deserves more
attention than other genocides? These are questions normally handled
with the highest degree of caution and deference, but not in the
case of author Tova Reich. In her fourth and latest novel, My
Holocaust, Ms. Reich takes these issues on in a delightfully
irreverent style certain to break even the sternest of readers...
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Hartford Courant – April 15, 2007 -- Making A
Killing Off The Killing -- Satire Excoriates The Marketing Of The
Holocaust -- By CAROLE GOLDBERG --
A quick glance at the perky cover of "My Holocaust," with its
garlands of barbed wire, tiny figurines - some in striped prisoner
garb and some with shovels - and candy-striped signposts to
Auschwitz and Birkenau, all done in the manner of a cutesy toy
village, is your first tip-off. And soon after beginning this
viciously funny, head-spinning novel about the commoditizing of
victim-hood and the marketing of memorialization, you're hesitant to
touch its pages, lest the coruscating satire burn your fingertips.
And once you've been introduced to the venal camp survivor Maurice
Messer, who speaks with a Jackie Mason-style accent and once
manufactured girdles but now runs Holocaust Connections Inc.; his
son Norman, nerdy and self-aggrandizing in equal measure; and
Norman's mysterious daughter...
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Chicago Sun Times – April 15, 2007 -- Holocaust
ha, ha, ha -- BY CARLO WOLFF --
The heady and complicated satire, My Holocaust, is amusing and, at
times, very funny. Some might find such a treatment of such a
subject offensive. Making fun, though not light, of a topic as
fraught as the Holocaust takes chutzpah, a quality in which author
Tova Reich abounds. Reich is also unforgiving, caustic and
liberating. Even when her cast swells so that it strains the novel's
cohesiveness, Reich's impatience with whining and intolerance of
pretentiousness keep it on course. Despite a humorous, if cutting,
tone and occasional mystical references, My Holocaust is dead
serious in intent. It's about the defilement and trivialization of
memory. It's about the dumbing-down of suffering, about the
commercialization of tragedy...
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Philadelphia Inquirer – April 10, 2007 -- Brash
satire set at Auschwitz mocks martyrdom -- Reviewed by Karen
Heller -- My Holocaust by Tova Reich, HarperCollins. 326 pp. $25 --
It takes considerable matzoh balls to publish a novel, a Swiftian
satire at that, entitled My Holocaust during Passover. Tova Reich is
fearless, in the best possible way, and her take on the culture of
victimization spares no captives in the gulag of self-anointed
martyrdom. In our thin-skinned culture, where anyone can be offended
by a pinprick of a slight, My Holocaust wickedly cuts to the
bone in a way that makes Christopher Buckley's comic romps, which I
admire, seem like teething exercises. The book begins at Auschwitz,
where Maurice Messer, a coward about everything but commerce, has
inflated his wartime activities. This isn't hard, as he lies about
everything...
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Los Angeles Times -- April 8, 2007 -- 'My
Holocaust' by Tova Reich -- A satirical look at the commodification
of the Holocaust. -- By Tara Ison --
CHARLIE CHAPLIN'S "The Great Dictator," Mel Brooks' "Springtime for
Hitler," Monty Python's "Mr. Hilter" — Hitler humor is nothing new.
But it's usually confined to burlesquing the wacky politico (that
ridiculous mustache, that maniacal gleam in the eye, that spitty
German accent) in a safely pre-genocidal context. Humor about the
Holocaust — the camps, the victims, the survivors, the horrific
banality — has long been off-limits. Nothing funny about it. Let's
not go there. But recent voices have been heard above the
reverential shushing: Francine Prose's mordant novella "Guided Tours
of Hell," say, or an episode of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," in
which an Auschwitz survivor and a veteran of CBS' reality show
"Survivor" argue over who had it worse...
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The Washington Post -- Sunday, April 8, 2007 -- Of
Mockery and Memory. A shocking novel rips those who trivialize the
Holocaust. -- Reviewed by Melvin Jules Bukiet --
Your mom's a drunk; your dad's a slut. Big deal! Your little sister
has cancer. You have cancer. Your whole family has cancer. So what?
-- They drove you off your land, enslaved your people; your shoes
are too small. Cut that whining and consider the Holocaust.
According to Tova Reich's passionately parodic new book, "There's no
contest. We Jews win this one hands down!" In fact, everyone in My
Holocaust does little but consider the slaughter of 6 million Jews
during the 1930s and '40s. Well, that and the benefits they derive
from keeping lit the eternal flame of remembrance. For Maurice
Messer and his nebbishy son Norman, genocide is the gift that keeps
giving. Maurice is chair of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington,
and Norman runs a company called Holocaust Connections that...
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Entertainment Weekly – March 30, 2007 (Pick of the
Week – an “A” review) -- ABSURD REICH Tova Reich's daring satire
targets all those who profit from Holocaust victimhood -- By
Lisa Schwarzbaum --
Fair warning to the easily offended: No activist on behalf of any
suffering class, however worthy, gets by unscathed in My Holocaust,
Tova Reich's incendiary, important, furiously hilarious satire of
the victim-commemoration industry. And the bulk of the blaspheming
is directed at prosperous living Jews who have devoted themselves to
Shoah business — that is, to the institutionalized sanctification of
the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis in the hell of 20th-century
history. Take wily, old, Polish-born Maurice Messer, creator of the
consulting firm Holocaust Connections, Inc.: Along with his adult
son, Norman (who's got problems with his meshuga daughter, now
cloistered in a...
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Forward -- March 23, 2007 -- The
Greatest Shoah on Earth -- Novelist Takes Aim at World of
Holocaust Commemoration -- By Gabriel Sanders --
Of all the hucksters, fakers, phonies and wannabes to have been
spawned by the socalled Shoah business, few can hold a (yahrzeit)
candle to Maurice Messer, the fumbling, stumbling, malapropism-
spewing figure at the heart of Tova Reich's deliciously wicked
satirical novel My Holocaust. A wheeler-dealer, schnorrer, glutton
and letch and, yes, a Holocaust survivor Messer got his start in
ladies' undergarments. But when the Holocaust became more
fashionable even than padded brassieres, he changed course and,
together with his nebbish son, Norman, founded Holocaust
Connections, Inc., a concern devoted to lending the imprimatur of
the Holocaust to any and all comers for the right price, of
course...
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Booklist Review – March 15, 2007 -- My Holocaust, TOVA REICH. HarperCollins, $24.95, (336p) ISBN
978-0-06-117345-5 --
While Reich’s focus is on the Holocaust and its symbol, the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum, her broader target is manipulation and
mendacity in contemporary society. Holocaust survivor Maurice
Messer, who runs Holocaust Connections Inc. (“Make Your Cause a
Holocaust”) with his son Norman, is the president-appointed chairman
of the board of the Holocaust Museum, soliciting seven-figure
contributions on a private tour of death camps, while Norman tries
to see his daughter, who—to the despair of her parents—has joined a
Carmelite convent just outside Auschwitz. Because of Maurice's
stature, his misrepresentation of his wartime heroics is protected
by survivors who know the truth, to keep from providing ammunition
to Holocaust deniers. But the threat to the museum and what it
symbolizes is ultimately not from deniers but from the United
Holocausts Rainbow...
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Publishers Weekly – February 29, 2007 -- My
Holocaust, TOVA REICH. HarperCollins, $24.95, (336p) ISBN
978-0-06-117345-5 -- In this savage
satire of Holocaust commemoration’s misuses, Reich paints and
pillories a culture of victimhood that, with its accompanying
commemorative kitsch, all but eclipses the actual victims. Novelist
Reich (The Jewish War) sketches a gallery of “Holocaust
hangerson,” grotesques eager to hijack the Shoah for tawdry
commercial and ideological purposes. Presiding over the strategic
exploitation is Maurice Messer, a retired ladies' undergarment maker
who has parlayed inflated claims of being an anti- Nazi partisan
into the chairmanship of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum; his feckless son, Norman, president of Holocaust Connections
Inc., a brand consultancy with the motto “Make Your Cause a
Holocaust” (of which Maurice is board chairman); Norman’s daughter,
Nechama, who has embarrassingly run off to...
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Kirkus Review – February 1, 2007 -- My Holocaust, TOVA REICH. HarperCollins, $24.95, (336p) ISBN
978-0-06-117345-5 --
A harshly provocative satire on the commodification of the Holocaust
and competition for greater victimhood.
Reich (The Jewish War, 1995, etc.) brings a relentlessly withering
judgment to bear on the proliferation of museums, elites and status
claims that have sprung from the Shoah. Less a story, it's more a
farcical parade of clamoring self-deluders, appropriators,
manipulators and fools, connected by blood or history or
circumstance. The novel's first two thirds are set at Auschwitz, a
site now hopelessly debased by familiarity and insincerity, where
bored guides drone statistics, Zen masters seek awareness and Poles
rifle the ash pits for fertilizer. Here, irrepressible (and
fraudulent) survivor Maurice Messer, late of Holocaust Connections,
Inc., now the president-appointed chairman of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in...
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