Judenstaat by Simone Zelitch
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Tale of Loose Ends

To say this book is pointless is of course only to admit that I can't see the point. There is a geo-political narrative, inter-laced with a personal narrative, overlaid with a narrative of Jewish sectarianism. None, however, is either developed or resolved. Important events in all three are described and then left without explanation or consequence. The Soviet Union and the United States conspire to make a neutral buffer state in Saxony as a Jewish homeland. An interesting premise; but it leads nowhere. The protagonist loses a week of her life in an apparent abduction, an event which doesn't trouble her further, nor does it have any relevance to the development of her story. A key piece of historical evidence, introduced in unlikely circumstances, is made even more unlikely when the heroine re-discovers it in plain sight after extensive secret service searching. Hasidim, 'black hats', operate an independent country within a country which is suddenly and without explanation ex-populated. A small child enters the narrative, plays an unessential role, and disappears; as does a Stasi agent, several co-workers of the protagonist; other characters from her past appear and vanish without contributing to the plot or character. Is this a new form of post-modernist story-telling using quasi-Murdochian metaphor or a very badly constructed piece of incipient but cramped imagination?

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