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INTRODUCTION

When Chaim Skibelski is killed along with the other Jewish citizens of a small Polish town, his story is just beginning. Now a ghost, Chaim wanders the countryside, often accompanied by his rabbi, who has turned into a crow. He visits his home, now occupied by a Polish family whose dying daughter is the only one who can see him. He meets a talkative head that belongs to the soldier who may have shot him. He visits a grand hotel that caters to the dead with mysterious comforts -- and helps two eccentric holy men search for the fallen moon. This afterlife is a remarkable journey, a long way from a peaceful eternity... and this stunning novel is one of the most highly praised and honored literary efforts of the year.

ABOUT JOSEPH SKIBELL

Joseph Skibell holds an M.F.A. from the University of Texas Center for Writers. He was the 1996-97 Halls Fellow in fiction, and a recipient of a James A. Michener Fellowship.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSEPH SKIBELL

Is it true that your novel started out as a play?

Well, not as a play exactly, but as a monologue in a play that I was writing at the time and which, incidentally, I have never finished. The play was about a character very much like myself, coming to terms with the effect his aunts' and uncles' and great-grandparents' deaths in the Holocaust have had on him. At one point, the ghost of the main character's great-grandfather enters the stage, gunshot wounds in his face, et cetera, et cetera, very dramatic, you know, and he starts to speak. I had written this scene maybe fifteen times and was totally stuck. The whole play simply could not get over the hump of this one scene. (It still hasn't). Anyway, the great-grandfather's character recalls the day he died, the day the Germans roared into town, rounding up Jews and shooting them in the forest. And to my horror -- or to my additional horror, apart from the subject matter -- I saw that the character wasn't even speaking in dialogue. It was prose! I did everything I could to turn my great-grandfather's words into stage dialogue.

Like what?

I added "ums" and "uhs," I had him repeating words, stuttering, things like that. But there was no denying it: the monologue was in prose.

So what did you do with it?

I didn't know what to do with it. I kept it, fortunately. I filed it away in an ever fattening file of rejected drafts of an impossible scene in an unwritable play, and then, one day, it occurred to me that I could perhaps turn it into a short story. I had seen a notice for a short story contest and was trying my hand at the form, and I thought this might make a good little story. So I took the monologue out of the file, dusted out all the "ums" and "uhs," the speechy repetitions and whatnot, and when I sat down to write, the whole story came pouring through me. In one very intense sitting. In fact, I can remember getting to one particularly appalling detail, the gifts exchanged by the Polish family around the breakfast table the morn-ing after they move into my great-grandparents' house -- and I myself was appalled and sickened as the words appeared on the page, as though I were not the scene's writer but its first reader. It was only about one thousand words, but by the time I got to the end, I was exhausted.

But how did it become a novel?

Well, as soon as I wrote the closing period, the first sentence of what became the second chapter ("The Rebbe is not his usual self") presented itself to my inner ear, but there was no way I could continue writing. So I kept that sentence buzzing around in my aural safe-deposit box for a few months, and it eventually launched the second chapter, and ultimately the book.

In the book, the fantastic elements are so...


Yeah: dead Jews, talking animals. Did that weirdness just leap out at you during that intense hour of writing?

Well, for years I've been a great lover of fairy tales and folk tales. Yiddish folk tales, especially, speak to me. It's my culture, after all. And I guess I had been soaking my consciousness in them for so long that a story with talking animals and Rabbis turning into birds and Jews unable to get into the World to Come didn't seem that strange to me. Also, it always struck me how much the Holocaust (which, to some extent, is the invisible backdrop to my childhood) seemed foreshadowed in the tales of the Brothers Grimm: the oven in Hansel and Gretal becomes the ovens of Auschwitz; the Pied Piper leading away the rats and then the children of Hamelin is, to me, the story of World War II. Hitler as the mesmerizing entrancer seducing the "rats" -- which is how the Nazis characterized European Jewry -- to their doom; the bad faith of the German people; the loss of their children, the next generation, who suffer the consequence of their bad faith: what is that if not the story of the Holocaust? And, believe me, after 150 years of "The Jew in the Thornbush" as a bedtime tale, nothing the Germans did should come as a surprise. So, anyway, I always had this idea, I had always made that connection, but I didn't really want to work through the medium of German folk tales. And when I eventually discovered the great wealth of Jewish and Yiddish tales, I knew I had found my form.

A moment ago, you called the Holocaust the "invisible backdrop to my childhood." Can you explain?

Yeah, I guess...I don't know. Although my parents were American, I grew up surrounded by great-aunts and -uncles and my grandparents, who were all European. My grandfather and his brothers were the sons of Chaim Skibelski. Chaim had had ten children. All of his daughters and one of his sons died in the war, and also all their children. My grandfather escaped, as did my uncle Sidney, who fled to Poland with his wife, Regina, and wound up in a Soviet work camp, which was nearly as bad as a German concentration camp. Eventually, they made it to America, after the war. All in all, about eighteen members of our immediate family had just disappeared, violently, from the face of the earth. And no one ever talked about it. This silence, I think, haunted me as a child and formed my character in a number of ways which eventually were not that pleasing to me. So the book is an attempt on my part to recover from the silence a family history that, except for a clutch of photos and whatever is encoded genetically, has all but disappeared. It's an imaginative reconstruction, of course, not a historical one, and because of that, I feel it is somehow truer. In any case, through this imaginative reconstruction, I've gotten to spend two very intimate years, primarily with my great-grandfather, but also with my great-grandmother, and my great-uncles and -aunts and cousins, through writing this book. They've taught me a lot.

Would you characterize the novel as a book of forgiveness?

That's a complex issue. As Chaim says to the head of the German soldier, "You've taken everything from me. Must you have my forgiveness as well?" It's not really up to me to forgive. Or not completely, anyway. I can only forgive the effect it's had on me. Most of the ones who could forgive have been dead for fifty years and soon most of the ones who need forgiveness will be dead as well. Have the culpable ones even asked for forgiveness? Not only for what was done to the Jews, but to the whole world. I feel the world suffered a tremendous blow. I don't know, I don't know. In Jewish thought, we are taught to look at everything that happens to us as a blessing. Good or bad. There is only one God, after all, who is the source of everything, so everything is a blessing. Or should be seen as such. It's not always easy to do that, I know. In any case, I hope this book is a book of blessing.

^*Reprinted with permission from the June '97 issue of The Algonkian

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. How does the author establish the fantastical nature of the novel from its very beginning? Why do you think the author utilized the plot device of turning the Rebbe into a crow? Why does this metamorphosis seem appropriate for the character? How does the first sentence of chapter two, "The Rebbe is not his usual self, that much is clear" (p.8), establish the mood and set up the action for part one of the book?
    
2. Chaim laments, "Without the moon, who can keep track of the time?" (p. 196). How does the author play with time as the novel progresses? How does this technique affect the way we experience Chaim's story? What is the significance of the 50 years that elapse during the course of the book?
    
3. Chaim is a man of almost unflinching faith, who believes, "What's forbidden is forbidden" (p. 226) and says, "If the Rebbe insists, who am I to argue?" (p. 219). How does Chaim's adherence to Jewish law both simplify and complicate his existence? What are his feelings about the stringent Hasidic beliefs he witnesses by observing Kalman and Zalman? How does their discussion of whether the Law permits them to take the abandoned boat (pp. 105-109) foreshadow the events of the novel's conclusion?
    
4. Most of the characters are able to see the dead Chaim, but to others he and his blood are invisible. Who can see him, and who cannot? Why do you think the author decided to make him invisible to some? What is significant about the parts of the story during which Chaim bleeds? How and when are towels used as a ritual for cleansing and healing (see pp. 68, 129, and 243)?
    
5. What is the nature of the attraction between Chaim and Ola? Why does Chaim succumb to "what is forbidden" in this relationship? Why is he reluctant to reveal to her the truth about death (pp. 41-42)? What are Ola's greatest gifts to Chaim?
    
6. The themes of abandonment and loss are ubiquitous in the novel, and Chaim often exclaims, "What can God be thinking!" If God could answer Chaim, how do you think their conversation would progress? How would Ola, the Rebbe, Ester, Ida, and others explain to Chaim their own "abandonment" of him?
    
7. The Hotel Amfortas is a unique and colorful representation of Chaim's idea of paradise. Describe your own version of the ideal "Hotel Amfortas" and the events that would take place there. How do the similarities and differences illuminate the similarities and differences between you and the character of Chaim Skibelski?
    
8. What are the first clues that something is amiss at the Hotel Amfortas? How does the hotel's deterioration mirror the events and outcome of the Holocaust? What happens to Chaim physically and psychologically as the hotel falls into ruin (pp. 182-187)?
    
9. Explore the symbolism of the moon's burial beneath layers of corpses and the construction of the scaffolding from human bones held together by "a higher physics of some kind" (p. 234). Who was responsible for pulling the moon down from the sky in the first place? Is there more than one answer to this question?
    
10. The release of the moon from its burial site is simultaneous with the release of Chaim at the novel's climax. What does this transition require of Chaim, and how does he react at first? Do you think Ola would have been comforted if she had known what happens to Chaim on the last page of the book? Do you think Ola underwent a similar process? Why, or why not?
     
11. Chaim notes the blood and pockmarks that mar the moon's surface as it is about to be restored to its rightful place: "Forever now, the moon will appear this way, no longer the smooth and gleaming pearl I remember from my youth" (p. 244). How have the events of the Holocaust changed forever the way the world appears, and how might the preceding quotation begin to suggest the feelings of the descendants of those who died at the hands of Hitler's army? What does Chaim mean when he says, "Many worlds have been lost, not simply my own" (p. 210)?
     
12. While carrying the head of the German soldier, Chaim wonders, "Perhaps I would have been happier being born a wolf" (p. 114). Why does he momentarily feel he would be better off as a vicious animal? What does this fantasy reveal about his feelings toward his killers? About his own character? About his identity as a Jew? Why does he eventually relinquish this fantasy?