“While there’s never a good time to find Anne Frank in your attic, this was a particularly bad time,” Auslander writes. The Kugels are recent transplants from New York City to the countryside; they have a dangerously nosy tenant who demands storage space in the aattic where Anne is living; and Kugel’s mother lives with the family, pretending to be dying. She is also obsessed with the Holocaust. She travels with baggage that she will never unpack, “just in case.” The only item for which she will make an exception is a large framed picture of Alan Dershowitz that she hangs on the wall.
When Kugel contemplates calling the police about Anne Frank, he can imagine his Roth-worthy mother saying: “What’s the matter, you didn’t have Dr. Mengele’s number? He doesn’t make house calls?” When he recalls being taken on a tour of Holocaust sites as a young boy, he remembers his mother’s fury when he smiled for a snapshot taken in front of a crematorium. “You ruined the whole concentration camp for me, you know that?” she scolded. “You ruined the whole damn camp.”
It’s a tall order for Auslander to raise an essentially comic novel to this level of moral contemplation. Yet “Hope: A Tragedy” succeeds shockingly well. For every stroke of facetiousness here, there is a laceratingly tough appraisal of the way suffering is made holy. “Me, I’m the sufferer,” Anne finally says. “I’m the dead girl. I’m Miss Holocaust, 1945. The prize is a crown of thorns and eternal victimhood. Jesus was a Jew, Mr. Kugel, but I’m the Jewish Jesus.”
And Kugel, nebbish that he is, can go toe to toe with her, in ways sure to polarize Auslander’s readers. This book never aspires to be pious or politically correct. “Six million he kills,” Kugel tells himself, “and this one gets away.”
