From the first page of The Genizah, Karlin moves the reader effortlessly to the worlds of used to be and might have been. The narrator, Avram, and three friends discover a Genizah in the wall of the old Yeshiva they’re using as an art studio. According to the Law, old, worn out sacred texts are buried in such a crypt.
The discovered pages take Avram to Poland, to the village of Kolno in the 1930’s. The village sits on the border between Russia and Poland and has been part of both countries. The majority of Kolno’s residents are Jews, which makes it a target for rampaging Poles and Russians. The murder, looting, and rape of these attacks are accepted by the residents in the same way that other natural calamities, like drought or hurricanes.
The Nazi conquest of Poland gives license to even more horrifying waves of murder and rape. In this reality, Avram’s mother and father don’t escape to America but hide in the forest until they are ultimately caught and murdered.
The meat of the story isn’t the horrors visited on Jews, but the seemingly universal need to butcher the Other. Karlin points to My Lai in his personal experience. Through his alternate father’s adventures as a horse trader and smuggler in Kolno, Avram lives through love, loss, and betrayal. Ultimately, he faces the question of identity. He concludes that “we are the people to be whipped.”
Karlin’s language soars as Hebrew letters float like birds and sunshine paints beautiful women with greater beauty. Avram’s grandfather describes his relationship with his wife “…it is still a struggle to read the complex text she is” Or on being a Jew, “…it is understood, you see, that we survive by moving between the raindrops.”
The Jews of Kolno are in between—not just between Poland and Russia, but also individually “He had torn himself free from the inevitability of his life and was neither here nor there, nichstihein, nichstihier.”
Well worth wandering through the world could have been in a time that used to be. Five stars.