Australian author Bram Presser creates his grandparents' Holocaust story out of family history, imagination, old photographs, and ephemera in his heart-warming first novel, The Book of Dirt.

Growing up, Presser’s grandparents never talked about their Holocaust experiences. After they died, Presser read a newspaper article claiming that his grandfather had been selected by the Nazis to be the literary curator of Hitler’s Museum of the Extinct Race, which inspired him to learn more and eventually lead to this book.

The Book of Dirt is historical fiction set in the context of the Holocaust, but it should appeal to any reader interested in memory, identity, and family storytelling. It is a novel about how we know the people we love, and how we recreate their lives in memory. ( )

One of the most poignant things I've ever seen is a matchbox filled with soil in the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Elsternwick. Signage explains that this soil from the Nazi death camp where her mother was murdered, is the only token that her daughter has in remembrance. She has no photos, nothing in her mother's handwriting, nothing that she ever wore, nothing that she ever treasured, no family recipes, nothing made by her mother's hands. In a museum that has an emotional impact on all who visit, this exhibit is powerful: the existence of a woman that the Nazis sought to obliterate, can never be forgotten by anyone who sees that soil.

Bram Presser is a Melbourne author, and he would certainly have seen that exhibit too. Although his grandparents were Holocaust survivors, he also faced the question of an unknowable past, and he has also, as an act of defiance and homage, refused to let that past fade away. Instead, Presser has used as a literary device the ancient Jewish golem, a clay creature magically brought to life with words - so that his grandparents' lives can be told.

Within a few generations almost all of us will be forgotten. Those who are not will have no bearing on how we are remembered, who we once were. We will not be there to protest, to correct. In the end we might exist only as a prop in someone else's story: a plot device, a golem.

But Jakub Rand and his wife Daša are much more than mere plot devices in The Book of Dirt. When a previously unknown story about his grandfather surfaces after Jakub's death in 1996, here in Melbourne and shortly after the death of Daša, Presser set out on a quest to find out more. But the trail eventually went cold so the book blends fiction and memoir to recreate their story. It is, he says in Chapter One:

This is a book of memories, some my own, some acquired and some, I suppose, imagined.

It begins with a warning, almost everyone you care about in this book is dead. (p.9).

As he shows in his choice of epigraph, he writes in full awareness of his own temerity:
We're constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously because we recognise at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we correct the correction of this falsification, and we correct the result of the correction of a correction, and so forth.... (Thomas Bernard, Correction).

So. The book is prefaced by a cast of characters, some of whom are identified as members of the author's family past and present day, and others - such as Štěpánka Tičková, who turns out to be a garrulous and spiteful tattletale, must surely be a marvellous invention.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/11/11/the-book-of-dirt-by-bram-presser/ ( )