Forgetting

Finkelstein’s fascinating English-language debut chronicles a 20-something woman grappling with intergenerational trauma in 2010s France. Following the death of Alma’s grandfather Jacob, a Polish Jewish immigrant who narrowly escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Buenos Aires, she is distraught by the horrific images and facts she’s memorized about the Holocaust, a history she’s researched obsessively. She attempts to numb her mind by playing video games, watching horse races, or walking aimlessly around Paris while thinking of her childhood and about her dead dog, Edgar. Unable to forget about the Holocaust, she grows desperate. Her accounts of her relationships and her infancy turn increasingly unreliable and fractured as it becomes clear the extent to which the trauma endured by her Jewish ancestors has affected her psyche. (A nightmarish scene involving Edgar’s demise is not for the faint of heart.) Grounded by its protagonist’s distinctive, powerful voice, the novel brims with thought-provoking reflections on such weighty subjects as the passage of time and the politics of history and memory (“We made the victims into a cluster of numbers, and then we turned the executioners into a tangle of myths,” Alma notes about the Holocaust). Slim but impactful, this is a must-read. (Nov.)