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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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