The book of Aron

Review by New York Times Review

I FINISHED READING "The Book of Aron" shortly before Yom Hashoah. In observance of the day of Holocaust remembrance, the PBS program "Frontline" screened the 1945 documentary "Memory of the Camps." Partly edited by Alfred Hitchcock, the film is assembled from the scrupulously thorough footage shot by Allied forces as they liberated camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. The narration, recorded by the British actor Trevor Howard in 1985 from the original 1945 script, sounds very strange to 21st-century ears. Although ample in its expressions of sympathy and disgust, it also conveys a tone of shocked naïveté, even a whiff of condescension. The camp survivors are seen but not heard, presented as pitiful, accorded no role in the telling of their own stories. There is the strong sense that the script's author did not yet have sufficient context for horror of such magnitude. Without benefit of survivors' memoirs, forensic investigation, legal testimony and painstaking research, the narrator can say only what is obvious to the eye and give none of the explanatory detail that would, in a very short time, be seared into history's conscience. Jim Shepard has created his novel in a vastly different context. His is a grain of sand added to the vast shore of literary and scholarly reflection that has accumulated in the past 70 years. Perhaps in acknowledgment, Shepard has included six pages detailing the bibliographic sources on which he has drawn in creating "The Book of Aron." Readers familiar with Shepard, whose interests are various in the extreme (guillotines, Dutch flood management, special effects in the Japanese movies of the 1950s), will also be familiar with such bibliographies, but this one is, of necessity, impressively extensive. Shepard is a writer's writer, a skillful deployer of diverse voices who leans toward first-person narration. From the dangerously disaffected teenagers of his novel "Project X" to the elegiac voices of yearning middle-aged men of various nationalities and periods in his award-winning short stories, he's a master of the verbal fingerprint, someone who always appreciates the difference between the lightning bug and lightning. That's why "The Book of Aron" could also have been titled "The Book of Risks." In Aron, Shepard has willingly shackled himself to a severely constrained narrator. Very young (only 8 when we first encounter him), Aron is difficult to educate, prone to the illnesses that accompany poverty, emotionally stunted, underestimated by his family and disliked by his peers. To persuasively inhabit this character, Shepard must forgo a great many writerly tools and props. Among them: richness of vocabulary, any hint of lyricism or deep introspection, the flashy metaphor, the deft allusion. The reader senses that Shepard has laid all this on the altar as a kind of burnt offering - a holocaust in the service of the Holocaust. And so, sacrifice made, we dive into Aron's small, muddy, miserable world. His family occupies one crowded room in a shared hovel in a Polish village near the Lithuanian border. His father ekes out a meager living selling animal hides. His mother washes other people's floors and takes in laundry. When his father is offered better work at a fabric factory in Warsaw, the family moves from rural shtetl to urban slum. Many Holocaust narratives begin with the easier, more familiar trope of a bourgeois, assimilated family, warm and prosperous, gathering for aromatic Shabbat dinners in comfortably appointed, candlelit dining rooms. The war breaks in on these happy families and drags them under, stage by stage, stripping away their joys in an inevitable descent through hell's concentric circles. The typical narrative, as a Nazi officer remarks late in Shepard's novel, is of Jews who "never knew how good they had it, like the man who complained he had no golden shoes but didn't realize he was soon to lose his legs." Aron, for his part, barely has shoes of any kind, and inhabits a milieu in which a usable pair of legs is never taken for granted. His journey is lateral: from misery to slightly more misery, from a personal variety of oppression to a shared societal one. The Nazi invasion of Poland makes little initial impact on Aron's world. His preoccupation is his younger brother, whose bad lungs are slowly killing him. The yellow armbands, the ghetto walls rising around him, the ban on riding certain trolleys - all these are background details as Aron sits with his dying brother, staring out at a view of garbage cans. It is in these slow, empty hours that he first hears the broadcasts of Janusz Korczak's radio program, "The Old Doctor." Korczak is, of course, a renowned historical figure: author, pediatrician, activist for the rights of the child and director of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw that the Nazis ordered him to relocate within the walls of the ghetto. It is the relationship between Aron and Korczak that sits at the heart of the novel and, indeed, gives heart to this bleak story of loss, deprivation and betrayal. AS THE SITUATION in the ghetto grows ever more desperate, Aron becomes a grim version of the Artful Dodger. He steals from the destitute, he smuggles, he informs on his confederates, all to provide a meager sustenance for his family even as its members are torn from him. Now and then, he looks up from his scurrilous trades to note the Old Doctor at his very different rounds: interceding for the helpless, begging the supplies necessary to keep his orphans fed, providing moments of creativity and laughter to children who have known little of either. When Aron is himself orphaned, homeless and on the run from "the yellow police" of the Jewish Order Service, who help the Germans run the ghetto, the Old Doctor takes him in. It is in the orbit of this entirely good man that Aron's scarred heart begins to heal and expand. Korczak is able to see beyond Aron's hard shell and draw out the brave and empathetic being hidden within. And it was at this point in the novel that I gave way to a wistful speculation: What kind of riches might Shepard have had at his disposal had he chosen instead to tell this story through the doctor's erudite voice? In choosing Aron's more austerely limited one, Shepard may have done the more difficult, the more original thing, and yet I longed to hear from Korczak, to explore his soul in ways Aron cannot. Korczak refused multiple offers to save his own life, staying with his orphans until the end. In this account, we don't learn what that end is. Shepard is well known for his medias res endings; there is some small mercy in the fact that he employs such an ending here. GERALDINE BROOKS'S fifth novel, "The Secret Chord," will be published in October. As his situation grows dire, the boy becomes a grim version of the Artful Dodger.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Aron is a hopelessly inept Jewish village boy who despairs over his inability to learn the most basic things. Yet he discovers hidden strengths and talents when his family moves to Warsaw, and the Nazis erect the walls that formed the Jewish ghetto, hell on earth for hundreds of thousands of brutally confined, starving people. Newly enterprising and courageous Aron helps his family, whose hilarious argumentativeness keenly captures the resiliency of the Jewish spirit, by scrounging, stealing, lying, and smuggling as corruption and coercion become the order of the day. With other brave, crafty, and hungry children, he forms a band of intrepid looters, only to become entangled with a treacherously venal policeman. As life grows impossibly dangerous and terrifying, and families are taken away to be gassed, Aron finds refuge with the real-life Warsaw Ghetto hero, Janusz Korczak, a Jewish pediatrician and children's advocate who founded an orphanage and refused to abandon those in his care. Shepard (You Think That's Bad, 2011), a writer of extraordinary historical vision, psychological acuity, and searing irony, presents a profoundly moving portrait of Korczak; explores, with awe, our instinct to adapt and survive; and through the evolving consciousness of his phenomenally commanding young narrator, exposes the catastrophic impact of war and genocide on children. Shepard's magnificent tour de force will hold a prominent place in the literature of compassionate outrage.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Shepard (You Think That's Bad) is known for his enormous range and for the research that informs his many novels and stories-a reputation that will be reconfirmed with this novel, the acknowledgments section of which runs six pages long. And yet it is a supple, unlabored voice that issues from Aron (Sh'maya to his family), a young Polish Jew who survives as a thief, urchin, and smuggler forcibly relocated to Warsaw's Jewish ghetto following the German invasion. Typhus, blackmail, and the Nazis' wanton violence are routine, but perhaps the greatest threat is the Jewish Order Service, in charge of requisitions and expulsions, for whom Aron agrees to become an informer. Meanwhile, his gang-lead by the charismatic and more politically committed youth Boris-fight for control of the Quarter's meager resources. But Aron's alliances begin to shift following the rise of disappearances and quarantines, especially after he meets Janusz Korczak, "The Old Doctor," a famous radio personality turned guardian who runs a shelter for children even as news of the concentration camps begins to trickle down. Aron's fate will come down to a question of conviction: will Aron commit himself to Boris's cause, or embrace the doctor's selfless idealism? Shepard is a master with a light touch-but against the backdrop of the Holocaust, maybe a bit too light. Although this novel paints an unflinching portrait of the ghetto, many characters seem to stand in for ideas, and the limp plot is propped up only by Shepard's eye for detail. 50,000-copy first printing. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Starred Review. The Warsaw Ghetto during the darkest days of World War II is the setting of this important, heartbreaking but also inspiring new novel from National Book Award nominee Shepard (Like You'd Understand, Anyway). Told from the perspective of Aron, a Jewish boy in the ghetto, it is the study of the sadistic and systematic deprivation and dehumanization of a people. Forced with his family from the countryside into the ghetto, where he joins a band of hardy young smugglers, Aron eventually loses his entire clan to typhus, malnutrition, and forced labor and ends up in an orphanage in the ghetto run by Janusz Korczak, an important historical figure from this period. Korczak was a well-known advocate for children's rights before the war and became famous for the orphanage he ran in the ghetto, and the author brings this heroic figure powerfully to life. Shepard also skillfully depicts the blighted human and moral landscape within the ghetto, where normal understandings of right and wrong have become impossibly compromised under the pressure of extermination. Surrounded by devastation, hopelessness, and cruelty, Korczak becomes an exemplar of all that is good and decent in the human spirit. Few will be able to read the last terrible, inspiring pages without tears in their eyes. VERDICT Indispensable reading. [See Prepub 11/3/14.]-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Shepard tells the story of the Nazi-era Warsaw ghetto through the life of a 13-year-old Jewish boy who fends for his family by joining other boys and girls smuggling needed food and other goods. At first, the adventure is entertaining, but Aron's family members are taken away or die until he is left alone homeless and starving on the street. The boy is rescued by Dr. Janusz Korczak-a real-life figure who was a well-known advocate for children's rights in Europe and worked tirelessly to save the denizens of his orphanage in the ghetto, although he could have departed. After being rescued by the doctor, Aron still suffers, but at least he is not alone. The teen faces a moral dilemma when he is tricked by a Jewish ghetto policeman into cooperating. His attempts to extricate himself should provide thoughtful questions for young and adult readers alike. What could the protagonist have done differently? The further reading list in the back matter includes works that will be especially helpful for teens wanting to know more about the historical details, such as Larry Stillman and Morris Goldner's A Match Made in Hell (Univ. of Wisconsin Pr., 2003) and Yehuda Nir's The Lost Childhood (Scholastic, 2002). VERDICT The writing is simple and effective. Because of the book's emotional impact, it should prove to be a valuable addition to those studying the Holocaust.-Karlan Sick, Library Consultant, New York City © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An understated and devastating novel of the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation, as seen through the eyes of a street-wise boy.Shepard has recently earned more renown for his short stories (You Think That's Bad, 2011, etc.), but here he presents an exhaustively researched, pitch-perfect novel exploring the moral ambiguities of survival through a narrator who's just 9 years old when the tale begins. He's a Jewish boy living in the Polish countryside with his family and an odd sense of his place in the world. "It was terrible to have to be the person I was," he despairs, matter-of-factly describing himself as basically friendless, a poor student, and an enigma to his loving mother: "She said that too often my tongue worked but not my head, or my head worked but not my heart." Yet Aron proves to be engaging company as he describes the selfishness that will help him survive as the world becomes increasingly hellish. The horrors are so incremental that Aronand the readermight be compared to the lobster dropped into the pot as the temperature keeps rising past the boiling point. Aron's perspective is necessarily limited, and he often seems to have little understanding of what's happening around him or why. His family is pushed into the city, and in the ghetto's chaos, he's separated from them. Serving as a moral counterweight to the boy's instinctive pragmatism is Dr. James Korczak, a real-life Polish Jew whose ambition to "become the Karl Marx of children" inspired him to keep a couple hundred alive through his orphanage, which he supports by begging for funds from the better-off ghetto inhabitants. Aron becomes the doctor's ward and accomplice, though he has also been serving as an occasional informer for the Gestapo through an intermediary in the Jewish police. He tries to use his position to help save the doctor from being sent to a concentration camp, but the doctor is only interested if he can save all the other children as well. "How do we know if we love enough?" asks the doctor. "How do we learn to love more?" Ordinary people reveal dimensions that are extraordinarily cruel or kind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done, and my uncle told everyone they should have called me What Were You Thinking. I broke medicine bottles by crashing them together and let the neighbors' animals loose from pens. My mother said my father shouldn't beat such a small boy, but my father said that one misfortune was never enough for me, and my uncle told her that my kind of craziness was like stealing from the rest of the family. When I complained about it my mother reminded me I had only myself to blame, and that in our family the cure for a toothache was to slap the other side of your face. My older brother was always saying we all went without cradles for our backsides or pillows for our heads. Why didn't he complain some more, my mother suggested. Maybe she could light the stove with his complaints. My uncle was my mother's brother and he was the one who started calling me Sh'maya because I did so many things that made him put his finger to his nose as a warning and say, "God has heard." We shared a house with another family in Panevzys near the Lithuanian border. We lived in the front room with a four-paned window and a big stove with a tin sheet on top. Our father was always off looking for money. For a while he sold animal hides. Our mother wished he would do something else, but he always said the pope and the peasant each had their own work. She washed other people's floors and when she left for the day our neighbors did whatever they wanted to us. They stole our food and threw our things into the street. Then she came home exhausted and had to fight with them about how they'd treated us, while I hid behind the rubbish pile in the courtyard. When my older brothers got home they'd be part of the shouting, too. Where's Sh'maya? they'd ask when it was over. I'd still be behind the rubbish pile. When the wind was strong, grit got in my eyes. Sh'maya only looks out for himself, my uncle always said, but I never wanted to be like that. I lectured myself on walks. I made lists of ways I could improve. Years went by like one unhappy day. My mother tried to teach me the alphabet, unsuccessfully. She used a big paper chart attached to a board and pointed to a bird or a little man or a purse and then to the letter that went with them. A whole day was spent trying to get me to draw the semicircle and straight line of the letter alef. But I was like something that had been raised in the wild. I didn't know the names of objects. Teachers talked to me and I stared back. Alef, beys, giml, daled, hey, vov, zayin. My last kheyder results before we moved reported my conduct was unsatisfactory, my religion unsatisfactory, my arithmetic unsatisfactory, and even my wood- and metal-shop work unsatisfactory. My father called it the most miserable report he'd ever seen, and invited us all to figure out how I had pulled it off. My mother said that I might've been getting better in some areas and he told her that if God gave me a second or a third life I'd still understand nothing. He said a person with strong character could correct his path and start again but a coward or weakling could not. I always wondered if others had such difficulty in learning. I always worried what would become of me if I couldn't do anything at all. It was terrible to have to be the person I was. I spent rainy days building dams in the street to divert the runoff. I found boards and pushed them along puddles with sticks. My mother dragged me out of the storms, saying when she found me that there I sat with my dreams full of fish and pancakes. She said while she bundled me into bed next to the stove that I'd never avoided an illness, from chicken pox to measles and scarlet fever to whooping cough, and that was why I'd spent my whole life ninety-nine percent dead. At night I lay waiting for sleep like our neighbor's dog waited for passing wagons. When she heard me still awake my mother would come to my bedside even as tired as she was. To help me sleep she said that if I squeezed my eyelids tight, lights and planets would float down past them, though I'd never be able to count them before they disappeared. She said that her grandfather told her that God moved those lights and planets with his little finger. I told her I was sorry for the way I was and she said that she wasn't worried about school, only about how I was with my family and our neighbors. She said that too often my tongue worked but not my head, or my head worked but not my heart. * Yet when my younger brother was born, I told her I wanted him thrown into the chicken coop. I was glum that whole year, when I was four, because of an infected vaccination on my arm. My mother said I played alone even when other kids were about. Two years went by without my learning a thing. I didn't know how to swim or ride a bicycle. I had no grandparents, no aunts, and no godparents. When I asked why, my father said it was because society's parasites ate well while the worthy received only dirty water, and my mother said it was because of sickness. I attended kheyder until my father came back from one of his trips and told my mother that it was 1936 and time for me to get a modern education. I was happy to change, since our kheyder teacher always had food in his beard and caned us across the fingers for wrong answers and his house smelled like a kennel. So instead I went to public school, which was cleaner all around. My father was impressed that my new teacher dressed in the European style and that after he taught me to read I started teaching myself. Since I was bored and knew no one I took to books. And in public school I met my first friend, whose name was Yudl. I liked him. Like me, he had no future. He was always running somewhere with his nose dripping. We made rafts to put in the river and practiced long-distance spitting. He called me Sh'maya too and I called him Pisher. When he wasn't well-behaved he was clever enough to keep the teacher from catching on. One morning before anyone arrived we played tipcat so violently we broke some classroom windows. We scared the boys who had nice satchels and never went barefoot. He was always getting me into trouble at home, and one Sabbath I was beaten for taking apart the family scissors so I could have two little swords, for him and for me. His mother taught him only sad songs, including one about the king of Siberia, before she got sick because of her teeth and died. He came looking for me once she was dead but I hid from him. He told me the next day that two old men carried her out of the house on a board and then his father moved him away. * That summer a card arrived for my father from his cousin in Warsaw, telling him there was work in his factory. The factory made fabric out of cotton thread. My father hitched a ride to the city in a truck full of geese and then sent for us. He moved us to 21 Zamenhofa Street, Apartment no. 6--my mother had us each memorize the address so we could find it when we got lost--and my younger brother, who had a bad lung, spent his days at the back window looking out at the garbage bins. We both thought the best thing about the move was the tailor's shop across the square. The tailor made uniforms for the army and in the front of his window there were three rows of hand-sized mannequins, each dressed in miniature uniforms. We especially loved the tiny service ribbons and medals. Because it was summer I was expected to work at the factory, so far away that we had to ride the trolley. I was shut up in a little room with no windows and four older boys and set to finishing the fabrics. The bolts had to be scraped until they acquired a grain like you found on winter stockings. Each of them took hours and someone as small as me had to lean his chest onto the blade to scrape with enough force. On hot days sweat ran off me like rain off a roof. The other boys said things like, "What a fine young man from the country we now have in our midst; he's clearly going to be a big wheel in town," and I thought, am I only here so they can make fun of me? And I refused to go back. My father said he would give me such a beating that it would hurt to raise my eyebrows, but while I sat there like a mouse under the broom my mother stopped him and said there was plenty I could do at home and school was beginning in a few weeks anyway. My father said I'd only been given a partial hiding and she told him that would do for now, and that night once they started snoring I crept to their beds and kissed her goodnight and pulled the blanket from his feet so that he'd maybe catch a chill. Because I couldn't sleep I helped her with the day's first chores, and she told everyone she was lucky to have a son who didn't mind rising so early. I worked hard and kept her company. I emptied her wash buckets and fetched hot compresses for my brother's chest. She asked if this wasn't much better than breaking bottles and getting into trouble, and I told her it was. I was still so small that I could squat and ride the bristle block of the long-handled brush she used to polish the floors. When she told my father at least now their children were better behaved he told her that not one of us looked either well-fed or good-tempered. He joked at dinner that she cooked like a washerwoman. "Go to a restaurant," she said in response. She later told me that when she was young she never complained, so her mother would always know who her best child was and keep her near. So I became myself only once the lights went out, and in the mornings went back to pretending things were okay. * At our new school we sat not at one filthy table but on real school benches. I wanted more books but had no money for them and when I tried to borrow them from my classmates they said no. I dealt with bullies by not fighting until the bell for class was about to be rung. When my mother complained to my teacher that a classmate had called me a dirty Jew, my teacher said, "Well he is, isn't he?" and from then on she made me take weekly baths. I stayed at that school until another teacher twisted a girl's ear until he tore it, and then my mother moved me back to a kheyder where they also taught Polish, two trolley stops away. But I still shrank from following instruction like a dog from a stick. My new teacher asked my mother what anyone could do with a kid who was so full of answers. He's like a fox, this one, he said; he's eight going on eighty. And when she reported the meeting to my father he gave me another hiding. That night she came to my bedside and sat and asked me to explain myself and at first I couldn't answer, and then I finally told her that I had figured out that most people didn't understand me and that those who did wouldn't help. My two older brothers got jobs outside of town driving goats to the slaughterhouse and were gone until after dark, and like my father they thought my mother should stay at home, so she confided in me about her plan to expand her laundry business. She said it was no gold mine but it could be a serious help, especially before Passover and Rosh Hashanah. She told me she used some of their hidden savings to buy soap and bleach and barrels and that every time my father passed the money's hiding place she had a block of ice under her skull and could feel every hair on her head. I said why shouldn't she take the money, and she was so happy she told me that once I turned nine she would make me a full partner. And this made me happy, because I knew that once I had enough money I would run away to Palestine or Africa. The week before Passover we set giant pots of water to boil on the stove and we pushed all the bed linens and garments we'd collected from her customers into two barrels with metal rims and she lathered everything with a yellow block of soap before we rinsed it all and ran it through the wringer and dragged all that wet laundry in baskets up to the attic, where she'd strung ropes in every direction under the rafters. Since we opened the windows for the cross-breezes, she couldn't rest that night and whispered to me about the gangs that specialized in crossing rooftops to steal laundry, so I slept up there so that she could relax. "See? You don't only care about yourself," she whispered when she came to wake me the next morning. She put her lips to my forehead and her hand to my cheek. When she touched me like that, it was as if the person everyone hated had flown away. And while he was gone, I didn't let her know that I was already awake. Excerpted from The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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