by Carl Friedman (Author)
The legacy of the Holocaust is passed on to a young girl through her father's stories in this celebrated novel. When I was in the camp, her father's stories always begin. Although she lives in the everyday world of school and friends, a daughter is compelled by love to enter her father's harrowing world of hunger, death, and survival in the concentration camp. In a moving Afterword, the author sets the historical context for the novel and speaks directly about her own father, upon whom the novel is based. An extraordinary novel written with passion, lucidity, and restraint (The Forward).
Back Jacket
Nightfather is a novel about the Holocaust like no other. Written in a deeply affecting style mixing lightness with gravity, it captures not only the experience of the concentration camp, but also its powerful legacy, passed down to a new generation through the enormous bond of love that ties parent and child. In forty brief chapters, the young daughter of a survivor tells of the efforts she and her two brothers make to try to bridge the gulf between themselves and their father that has been formed by his camp experiences. Unlike many of his generation, who remain silent, their father feels compelled to repeat the details of his ordeal. The children inhabit two worlds at once: the world of school and their friends, and their father's nightmare world of hunger, gas, and the crematoria. Every ordinary incident - a trip to the zoo, a drive in the country, an invitation to join Brownies - evokes a memory and a story of the camp. What are children to make of stories of humiliation and murder? Where do the stories stop and reality begin? Striving to find a balance, the children consider their father's world in terms of their own. They have had chicken pox and measles; he has "camp". Toothpaste is not only for brushing teeth, but also for emergency use to prevent thirst. As their father prowls restlessly through the house at night, telling them more and more about the camp, the children's essential innocence remains strangely intact, making its horrors at once easier to face and all the more harrowing. Gradually, with accumulating force, the story of one man's imprisonment and the terms of his survival are revealed.