The Genizah

Definition: Genizah is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial.

In the novel The Genizah, Wayne Karlin enters its pages as a character in his own novel, reimagining his family's lives— and fate— if they had not come to America but stayed in his mother's village in Poland where the rest of her extended family were murdered by the Nazis in 1941.

Karlin commemorates and mourns that unutterable loss by making it present, in the spirit of the words from the Passover Seder, which asks those at the table to recount the story of oppression as if they had lived it.

It is a phrase that calls upon the people at the table to feel, not just to know, what happened, as good fiction calls us to do. How can anyone who had not been through the Holocaust share even a little part of such experiences? How can anyone who has not felt some of that horror reverberate in their own bones try to understand the terrible massacres of our own days, sparked by hatred of the Other, in Syria, in Myanmar, in Israel, in Gaza, in Charleston, and in Pittsburgh— in so many other places, they overwhelm our ability to empathize.

Karlin's answer to that question is to personalize the impersonal, to imagine what could have happened if his grandparents, and mother, and her brothers and sisters and his father and his family, had not torn themselves away from a place they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years, in a town and on a continent where they had always been unwelcome guests.

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