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Did you see yourself writing in a tradition of using humor to confront the horrors of genocide? Did you ever worry that a book about the Holocaust that included comedic moments would be seen as inappropriate?
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At one point you recommend Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” a collection of short stories based on his time in the camps. But another part is, well, here we are, and I need to find the men’s room. Right? But what is the appropriate response? I mean, part of me wants to kind of hurl myself on the ground and start keening, wailing and rending my hair. I guess I did the same thing when I visited the American Southwest and toured a Navajo reservation: the outsider coming to gawk a little bit at their tragedy. There was a lot of “Oh, I saw ‘Schindler’s List’” or “I’ve always admired the Jewish people.” And by the way, I say that not in judgment, I ended up kind of loving these people, but it was clearly massively uncomfortable for me.įor some of them it was less about the Holocaust than the fact that well, we just finished the Finger Lakes and we’re gonna go to Ireland after this, and it just so happens that this one is Eastern Europe You know, there’s a scene in the book where we went around a table and everybody had to say why they went on this tour. For another group of people, I think they had never seen a Jew before and because they watch the History Channel, they were kind of curious. For some of them it was less about the Holocaust than the fact that well, we just finished the Finger Lakes and we’re gonna go to Ireland after this, and it just so happens that this one is Eastern Europe. But for a certain kind of non-rich person who wants to travel, bus tours are a thing. But how was this tour marketed? What do you think your busmates were doing on it? You know, stop in Paris and make your way to Krakow. Why were they on a tour of death camps? I know even when Jews go to the camps, they usually try to balance it with something leisurely and redemptive. You describe your fellow travelers - the tough-guy older Jew Shlomo, a couple from Texas, the older gay couple. And on some level you like to think it’s relatable. Yeah, somewhere no one wants to go, but I drag the reader along. I see it as a piece with your other writing, where you go places where other people may not want to go, whether it is addiction, or mental illness. I grew up in a neighborhood in Pittsburgh where I was pretty much the only Jew and got routinely beaten up for killing Jesus, which you know, I must have done in a blackout at the age of five I just wanted to plunge into the heart of darkness, to use a really unenviable cliche. But as my grandfather once said - he was a Polish fella who came over here to escape the czar’s army - “If you ever forget you’re a Jew, a gentile will remind you.” So it wasn’t therapeutic as such. I grew up in a neighborhood in Pittsburgh where I was pretty much the only Jew and got routinely beaten up for killing Jesus, which you know, I must have done in a blackout at the age of 5. You know, I never identified particularly as a Jew. Was the tour for you meant to be therapeutic, or were you looking to understand something about the Holocaust? So there was a bit of a disconnect between what I might have expected and what I ended up seeing, It’s like, well, I went to see humanity and guess what, I saw humanity. And what I see are people sitting in the snack bar, eating a slice of pizza and slurping a Fanta. I went there expecting some lofty, soul-infusing, immense, life-changing experience, because it’s Auschwitz. So I had this crazy idea: I want to go somewhere where this massive, just bone-deep sense of despair is justified and appropriate. I come from a family of depressives and suicides, you know, not to brag. I went for perhaps the most tawdry of reasons, which is I was massively depressed, going through some hard times.
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What kind of conclusions were you hoping to reach for yourself? Jerry Stahl: That is my book in a nutshell, right there.