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The Memory Monster
The Memory Monster | Yishai Sarid
6 posts | 2 read | 13 to read
The controversial English-language debut of celebrated Israeli novelist Yishai Sarid is a harrowing, ironic parable of how we reckon with human horror, in which a young, present-day historian becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust. Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims' lives. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers--their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill. With the perspicuity of Kafka's The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo's White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it?
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Anna40
Anna40
The Memory Monster | Yishai Sarid
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Pickpick

The narrator is a historian specialised in the Shoa and a tour guide in the extermination camps in Poland whose initial approach to his job is intellectual and academic but as the book progresses the weight of the horror he recounts every day changes him. Written in epistolary form, the novel is filled with historical events, raises questions that are relevant today and is just … heartbreaking.

24 likes4 stack adds
review
LinesUponAPage
LinesUponAPage
The Memory Monster | Yishai Sarid
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Pickpick

The Memory Monster is a cautionary tale of how we can forget and commend those whose hatred was so vile that to some they were heroes.

Read my review here: https://sandralynnbrower.blogspot.com/

64 likes
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LinesUponAPage
LinesUponAPage
The Memory Monster | Yishai Sarid
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This book has some seriously mixed up stuff in it.

Israeli HS students touring the remnants of the Concentration Camps.

After 1st ellipses— “they hated the Polish much more. When we walked around the streets in cities and villages, whenever we met the local population, they would mutter words of hatred at them, about the pogroms they had committed, their collaboration, their anti-semitism.”

& not the Germans who did the torturing & killing?

LinesUponAPage After 2nd ellipses: “we‘ll never forgive the Arabs for the way they look, with their stubble and their brown pants that go wide at the bottom, their houses without whitewash and the open sewers on the streets, the kids with pink-eye.” So... okay, poor little pink-eyed kids. (edited) 4y
MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm Hmmm...reading the premise makes it sound intriguing. Stacking it out of morbid curiosity. 😅 4y
LinesUponAPage @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm Restless Books sent it to me, or i wouldn‘t have known it even existed. I‘m glad they did. It is morbid, and seriously expectant— people get obsessed with history and can‘t let it go and others have no clue and think it‘s all fake even when they see the proof, or don‘t blame the murderers. That‘s how I‘m taking this book. Tongue in cheek and yet, so realistic how people think which is seriously prevalent this year. 4y
ReadingEnvy @Lifeisasnap I just finished it and don't know what I'm supposed to think about it. Very intense. 4y
39 likes2 stack adds4 comments
blurb
LinesUponAPage
LinesUponAPage
The Memory Monster | Yishai Sarid
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Have you read The Memory Monster yet?? This book makes you think hard about how the past can consume you, and how people make decisions to which side they take in history.
This book reminds me in someways of the movie The Wave (1981) in that you can just go too far in unconsciously taking sides for good or bad.

(More in comments)

tagged users iconRestlessBooks
LinesUponAPage Yishai Sarid is a masterful storyteller. I thank Yardenne Greenspan for her translation from Hebrew of this story so those of us who don‘t take to learning languages well can read this story in English.
Thanks, @restlessbooks for allowing me to read The Memory Monster in lieu of my honest review. You always have the best international authors! 4y
Cinfhen I‘m curious about this one / great review 4y
Buechersuechtling Okay, no I want to read that book. 🙂 Thank you for your review. 4y
LinesUponAPage @Cinfhen thanks. It‘s got an interesting premise that‘s for sure. 4y
LinesUponAPage @Buechersuechtling do it, it‘s quite interesting. You can but laugh and be horrified at the same time. 4y
47 likes4 stack adds5 comments
review
BookishTrish
BookishTrish
The Memory Monster | Yishai Sarid
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Pickpick

An Israeli with a PhD in Holocaust History and unable to find a tenured position finds himself spending more and more time in Poland giving tours of the camps. As his popularity as a guide rises, he grapples with what carrying these memories mean. It‘s an intense, controversial, timely read. Highly recommended.

54 likes
blurb
BookishTrish
BookishTrish
The Memory Monster | Yishai Sarid
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Eeking out a last bit of daylight reading with this beautifully written book.

48 likes1 stack add