There is nothing particularly Jewish about D.O. Dodd's Jew, a text in which the word "Jew" is mentioned once throughout. And there is some question why there should be. What part Jews have to play in a contemporary reworking of the Holocaust nightmare is the mystery and provocation for which we read Jew.
That the conclusion is disappointingly drab and predictable upsets the universality of the book's premise, or at least its imaginative beginnings.
Dodd familiarizes us with a basic human fear from the opening page. Worse than being buried alive, the book's protagonist is buried alive in a mass grave in a tangle of corpses. He has to claw his way out.
"The bodies now seemed set on holding him to them, on preventing him from breaking loose, as he braced his hands against the cruel geometry of hard flesh to pry himself out of the hole.
"Struggling as though in concert with his struggling, the bodies cling on, then eventually, in giving increments, released their grip."
Our unnamed protagonist, once he emerges, performs one of the great transformations, becoming "the new commander" of a concentration-camp sub-universe. But his position is tentative; he impersonates the real commander, whom he kills as his first act. We are supposed to be surprised by the way he gels within this new reality, the way he wields a gun, the way he seems pre-programmed, as in a computer game, to kill and execute authority. There is also some suggestion that he is Jewish.
As the lines of the story become more finely drawn, Dodd's writing becomes hampered and confused and enters more highly contentious territory.
For some reason, within the "district" there are only women prisoners. While the "insurgents" appear to be men, one of whom throws a Molotov cocktail into the commander's office in the war, referred to as the "conflict," there is a conspicuous lack of male prisoners. How can this be explained within the narrative's wider reference? And why are all the women prisoners naked?
Or why does Dodd delight in bald description of rape and violation that recalls the trademark sadomasochism of Jerzy Kosinski?
Some of this starts to make sense as the book goes along. Like all dystopic novels, Jew has a contemporary political subtext. Drawn to equivalencies between the Nazis and Israelis, Dodd has evidently dismissed the arguments for the particularity of the Holocaust and fashioned an allegory of Israel's "persecution" of the Palestinians. But he has done so even more improbably with real tact and bravura, even employing linguistic allusions to the Holocaust to blur what we are witnessing.
There is an interesting turn at the book's end that reveals Dodd's greater meaning. When another man crawls from the corpses, it causes some major soul-searching. Apparently the "commander" and the "naked man" are half-brothers, like Isaac and Ishmael.
Dodd wants to say that we are all brothers, responsible to each other, indistinct from one another. But in doing so, he de-particularizes the Holocaust. He relates to people as ciphers, but in suggesting co-ordinates to anchor our story, his characters lack the particularity to live as anything more than stereotypes. Is a Jew really someone who likes naked women who bring them bagels in the middle of the night? The only discernible Jewish quality he gives his character is a self-doubting scrutiny.
Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of Iceland this past year.