Review: While the Messiah Tarries: Stories

While the Messiah Tarries: Stories by Melvin Jules Bukiet
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought I knew what to expect from this book. I think I must have read something from it years before – probably “Library of Moloch” – and had everything pegged in it as disturbingly heavy. That squared with Bukiet’s reputation as one of the important second-generation Holocaust writers.

So I was surprised to find so many of the early stories work more in a magical-realism mode. They still tend to be heavy on references to the Jewish legal tradition, so they feel like a cross between Steve Stern and Cynthia Ozick, but they are lighter than I expected. That’s truest in my favorite of the early stories, “Landsmanshaft,” where an old Jewish man – who has promised his enemy he’ll dance on his grave – fulfills the promise only to realize he is celebrating the lives they shared together and in opposition.

As this collection gets to the end, though, it gets heavier until it does feel like the Bukiet I thought I knew from less concentrated reading. The focus on the unthinkable, the Holocaust itself, becomes increasingly direct. It becomes a book that’s full of dread. And with that, I acknowledge Bukiet’s skill in putting it together. There is a thematic connection, but there’s also a distinct trajectory. “Library of Moloch” weighs as it does because he has set us up for it.

In those final stories, Bukiet follows a striking pattern: someone, somehow excavates a missing element of the Holocaust experience and then determines it’s too much. In the abstract, the protagonist makes the experience “live” again for a fleeting moment and then puts it out of reach of others who would try to recover it.

A “lighter” version of that narrative comes in “Postscript to a Dead Language” where a Jewish scholar reconstructs the entire Biblical-era Jerusalem. He doesn’t realize that his collaborator, a demented messianic-Christian, intends to use the model to perform a second crucifixion, hoping that his killing of the beautiful shikse Ira Kepler is in love with will bring about the second coming. Kepler survives only when he’s able to get Wilson Hemmings to glimpse the Holy of Holies where, when he sees the swastika that’s come to represent the unsayable heart of the Jewish faith, he suffers a heart attack. The model remains, but no one else will ever be able to see to the heart of it.

Things get darker in “Himmler’s Chickens” where our protagonist, Kahn, sets out to retrieve a home movie showing Heinrich Himmler killing his beloved farm animals as the Allies close in at the end of the war. He finally recovers it and is troubled by the way it humanizes Himmler, by the way he clumsily sets out to show his love for the animals he will not allow to fall into his enemies’ hands. As a result, having watched it once, Kahn throws it into the river, making it impossible for anyone else to see it.

All of this culminates in “Library of Moloch,” which is a haunting and damning story. In it, a man who has spent his career assembling a library to memorialize all those who suffered is accused by one “survivor” (who powerfully rejects that label since, she says, she had no agency in the experience, simply “remaining” after it ended) of being a voyeur, someone who wishes he had suffered as they did. It’s a brutal declaration, made all the worse because it seems as if it might be true not just for the Ricardo of the story but for Bukiet himself. That fearlessness in a writer is staggering, and it darkens not just the story but the whole collection tarnished which becomes all the more memorable as a result.

At the end, though, as we see in the other stories, Ricardo burns – or simply imagines himself burning – the memorial he has spent his life establishing.

There’s no denying the skill in these stories. This one has been around a while, but it remains relevant and powerful. I’m not claiming this is The Pagan Rabbi, but it belongs on the same shelf as some of the important work of the last half century confronting how we confront the Holocaust.


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