This is unlike any other Holocaust novel: think Tom Jones meets the Nazis and then runs across Europe in a picaresque adventure, complete with exceptional humour and wit. By the end of the novel, Barwin brings us back to Canada, drawing comparisons to Canada's treatment of Indigenous peoples. This is a brilliant book.

I'm having a tough time with this review.
As a whole I enjoyed this book, but there were some parts of the story that kind of lost me, I'm not sure if it was the writing or story related.
Spanning over many years we follow Motl from youth to old man, the majority of the story taking place as a middle aged man during WWII. Traversing across Europe first with his mother, then with Esther, and the people they meets and situations they get into.

I will say this is unlike an WWII book I have ever read.

I was rather enchanted by Gary Barwin’s previous novel — Yiddish for Pirates — and his latest, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, returns to familiar ground: Once more tracing the improbable adventures of a peripatetic Jewish man with punning wordplay, Borscht Belt groaners, and the inkiest of black humour. While the earlier novel tells a swashbuckling tale (as narrated by a parrot, no less), this time we’re set in the jaws of the Holocaust as our hero, the middle-aged Motl, fancies himself a cowboy like the heroes in his paperback Westerns; riding off into the sunset, one step ahead of the Nazis even as he gallops towards them. There’s nothing funny about the real horrors that Motl witnesses — the jokes are the powerful coping mechanism of a powerless people — and as the adventure progresses, Motl is forced to consider whether his spurs and six-gun fantasies put him on the wrong side of the Cowboys vs Indians mythos. Once again, I find myself enchanted by Barwin’s writing and am moved by his use of humour to reconfigure ugly historical fact; you can laugh or you can cry, boychik.

Some will read this just for Barwin's signature wordplay and humour, but so much more than that has been layered into this quixotic Holocaust cowboy tale. This is a searing commentary on how genocide repeats itself. Disturbing and brilliant.