Filip David and Trans. by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric
PositiveHistorical Novel SocietyIn 1941, Albert Weisz’s parents, in a desperate attempt to save their children’s lives, throw him and his brother, Elijah, from a train headed for the death camps. Albert survives the fall, but his subsequent failure to find Elijah, who has inexplicably vanished, burdens him with a sense of guilt no amount of Holocaust memorials and conferences can lighten ... As Albert seeks solace in Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, he experiences visions, in which he ‘sees’ his sibling—and his lost loved ones—as shining signifiers of the triumph of good over evil.
The House of Forgetting and Remembering is a tour de force reminiscent of Dostoyevsky; when Albert quotes from Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, he acknowledges that although our consciousness might wish to forget the horrors of our existence, it can find no respite in this world, where remembering the dead is a sacred duty.
