Maurice and Norman Messer, father-and-son business partners, know a good product when they see it. That product is the Holocaust, and Maurice, a Holocaust survivor with an inflated personal history, and Norman, enjoying vicarious victimhood as a participant in the second-generation movement, proceed to market it enthusiastically. Not even the disappearance of Nechama, Norman's daughter and Maurice's granddaughter, into the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, where she is transformed into a nun, Sister Consolatia of the Cross, deters them from pushing their agenda. Father and son embark on a tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which Maurice - now the driving force behind the most powerful Holocaust memorialization institution in America - organizes to soften up a potential major donor, and which Norman takes advantage of to embark on a surrealistic search for his daughter. At the death camp they run into assorted groups and individuals all clamoring for a piece of the Holocaust, including Buddhist New Agers on a retreat, Israeli schoolchildren on a required heritage pilgrimage, a Holocaust artifact hustler, filmmakers, and an astonishing collection of others. All hell breaks loose when Maurice's museum is taken over by a coalition of self-styled victims seeking Holocaust status, bringing together a vivid cast of all-too-human characters, from Holocaust professionals to Holocaust wannabees of every persuasion, in the fevered competition to win the grand prize of owning the Holocaust. An inspiringly courageous and shockingly original tour-de-force, My Holocaust dares to penetrate territory until now considered sacrosanct in its brilliantly provocative and darkly comic exploration of the uses and abuses of memory and the meaning of human suffering.

Product Description Once a notorious hippie, Sammuel Himmelhoch joins a Hassidic sect of penitents in Jerusalem and becomes a Master of the Return, guiding fellow converts to the teachings of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslay From Publishers Weekly In Mara, Reich, herself the scion of a rabbinical family, took aim at the mores of American Orthodox Jewry. Here, she casts her sly, sardonic eye upon those at the opposite end of the spectrum, so to speakIsraeli penitents. With vigor, irreverence and devastating accuracy, she limns a flock of zany zealots, intoxicated by the rarefied Hassidism of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. These cultists, former hippies who are now "high on the One Above," are at once delightfully absurd in their revival, even invention, of bizarre customs (such as the paramount pilgrimage to Rabbi Nahman's Ukranian grave to terminate "nocturnal emissions"); poignant in their misguided, miseducated search for identity and redemption; as self-indulgent in their expiation as they once were in their passions; and alarming in their patent misogyny, racism, deceit, self-righteousness and extreme messianic political agenda. In Reich's hands, plot and character development are sacrificed to an extravagant religious and social parody cum cautionary tale. The penitents remain symbolic figuresas exemplified by an elderly midwife, whose name, Shifra-Puah, evokes her righteous colleagues from the biblical book of Exodus who disobeyed the pharaonic decree to murder male newborns, and Avraham Ger, whose surname, Hebrew for convert, proclaims his adoption of Judaism. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Samuel Himmelhoch was once lighting effects man for notorious rock groups, his wife Ivriya rode horses bare-breasted in Rosh Pina, and Sora Katz was the former Pam Buck of Macon, Georgia, but now they are all members of an extreme Hassidic sect, living together in the Moslem quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Described with affection and great insight, the riotous adventures of these sincere but sometimes misguided penitents easily mix the supernatural with human events. Reich pinpoints absurdity and self-righteousness beautifully, as when Reb Lev Luria pontificates in gematria (talmudic numeric equivalents) derived from his newly donated computer. An arrestingly comtemporary treatment of Jewish spirituality and renewal. Highly recommended. Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.