The Victory

This novella is part of a series in which Grynberg, a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the U.S. in 1968, fictionalizes the events of his life from WW II onward. This volume follows events from the last weeks of the war through the Communist takeover of Poland. The unnamed narrator, a nine-year-old boy, and his widowed mother have survived the war by passing as Aryans, and they must decide how to live in the aftermath of brutality. The boy insists to his mother, ``I don't want to be Jewish anymore.'' The mother takes up with a Russian officer who is eventually sent back to the front. Finally, she marries an old flame, himself a widower. He is entrapped by an informer in a black-market currency scheme and sentenced to a labor camp. Grynberg's deadpan, uninflected prose becomes wearing after a while, but the book has moments of appalling power, particularly in its scenes of violence. Perhaps its most effective moment comes when a German soldier is stoned to death by a crowd of outraged Jewish survivors, an act that is immediately followed by an even more horrifying one, the beating of a mute boy who is mistaken for a German. (Dec.)