Spoiler-free summary: A memoir of the author – as the character Piri – who was a Jewish girl living through World War II in Hungary with her family. It is an important story that (unsurprisingly) gets progressively bleaker throughout the novel, but it is also dry in its telling.
Discussion: This was a bit of a slog for me. Like I said in the summary, this is an important story that needs to be told and remembered, but it has a couple things going against it that made me put it down repeatedly. The first is that there is no narrative arc here – it’s a steady ratcheting up of anxiety and hopelessness that ends with the family getting on a train to Auschwitz. I don’t have any problems with that from the perspective of a storytelling choice – Piri obviously survives to write this book (and Siegal is apparently still alive today, at 94 years old!), so this could have had something like a happy ending with the end of the war and the liberation of the camps, but if there’s any story that doesn’t owe us a happy ending, it’s a Holocaust novel. But it felt like taking my medicine to read it.
I think this was amplified by the writing style. I had a lot of time to think about this novel since I took so long reading it, and I was wondering what this would look like if it were being written today. I briefly had the thought that it would be put in the first person to make it a bit more immediate, only to remember it is in the first person. Maybe it’s the use of the past tense, but it feels like a woman in her 50s telling you the story, not a girl currently living it. There’s a distance there.
Part of the drag of reading this might be that I spent part of June and July catching up on Newbery contenders from this year, and a surprising number of the top books on the Heavy Medal blog poll are at least related to the Holocaust, if not fully set in it. Max in the House of Spies is about a Jewish kid living in World War II training to be a spy to go to Germany, The Color of Sound by Emily Barth Isler is about a Jewish girl whose family’s history surviving the Holocaust comes into play. More directly, Tree. Table. Book. by Lois Lowry has an old woman in the present day telling a neighbor girl about her Holocaust survival story in Poland. That these books had frames around their Holocaust stories might have made them more of a pleasure to read. (The latter two books I liked a lot, Max less so.)
As a contrast, I started The Night War, which is about a Jewish girl in German-occupied France, but DNF’d about five chapters in. I don’t like to critique a book having not finished it, but what I did read came off as more sentimental than I prefer to read. The Holocaust is an easy subject to fall into that style; it was a case of such pure evil and millions of tragic stories. To Upon the Head of the Goat‘s credit, it is not a sentimental book. The problem is, it might go fully in the opposite direction – like I said, there feels like a distance between the reader and the characters.
Mixing things up a bit with my next book, what looks to be fantasy – The Gammage Cup by Carol Kendall.
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