Ken Barris
A BLESSING ON THE MOON by Joseph Skibell (Abacus, R99,99)
A Blessing on the Moon is Joseph Skibell’s account of his own grandfather’s death in the Holocaust: the novel starts with Chaim Skibelski being shot, together with 3 000 fellow Jews, outside a small Polish town. Although dead, Skibelski is unable to enter the World to Come; he escapes the grave, but is unable to escape the limbo in which he finds himself, and the narrative takes it from there.
Skibelski’s position is not exactly original – Russell Hoban’s Pilgerman uses the same perspective, deals with the theme of anti-Semitism too, and makes similar use of the Wandering Jew stereotype – but it remains unusual ground on which to place a narrator, which is a blessing in its own right. This becomes a mixed blessing, however, as the structural choices made by Skibell at the outset limit his options further down the line when it comes to credibility. The voice is particularly accomplished for a first novel, but not entirely original either: it is rooted in the tradition of Yiddish writing exemplified by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
In the first part of the novel, the undead Skibelski goes back to his house, which is now occupied by a Polish family. Only one member of the family can see him, the daughter Ola, who is dying of consumption. In his dialogue with this family, which he comes to haunt, Skibelski enters into the language of hatred and suffering that defined his otherness in the first place, that in effect caused his death.
Despite his deadness, he is further mutilated by this encounter – his dead body weeps blood copiously, a cogent symbol if ever there was one. In his union with Ola, he responds to the hatred of her family by discovering ever deeper reserves of humanity and compassion in himself. Despite the sundering effects of his death and hers, he is still able to love. The first section of the novel is wonderful, and almost worth the price of the book alone.
In the second section, the rabbi of the murdered community, who has become a crow, leads Skibelski back to the mass grave of his people. The rabbi raises the dead, and so they begin a grotesque – read decomposed and suppurating – exodus through the frozen wastes of their spiritual condition.
In this dans macabre, mythographies intertwine: they arrive at the Hotel Amfortas, named after the Fisher King whose wounds, like Skibelski’s woundedness, are unhealable. A further stratum of meaning is disclosed, this time a layer of scathing irony in that the spa, with its genial Direktor, becomes an allegory of the Nazi death camps.
As the tale proceeds, Skibell’s fantasy becomes arbitrary, and in places jejune. The Hotel Amfortas sequence reaches its climax in the kitchen where a team of jolly bakers, worthy of Maurice Sendak’s Night Kitchen, bakes Jews in pies. The rabbi, restored to human form, becomes a mostly absent co-author, directing events from an omniscient perspective that is best explained by Skibell’s intentions for the plot.
Then there is an encounter with a pair of irascible Hasidic twins, who are nothing more than Tweedledee and Tweedledum with payes. Their mission is to restore the moon to its place in the heavens, from which it has been dislodged by the Holocaust. And though the moon is a large and cosmic symbol, Skibell’s treatment of it leaps right over and lands on the other side.
This lunar material is entertaining, but has a trivial place in the moral economy of the novel. So, the directed allegory of the second section gives way to unalloyed fantasy in the third, which at times verges on unalloyed nonsense. I have no objection to nonsense for its own sake, but its presence knocks the book out of focus. If it is spiritual restitution that is sought, a sense of balance for an attempted genocide, then a piece of aesthetic whimsy won’t do the trick.
A Blessing on the Moon remains a sweet, curious, morbid and interesting novel, certainly worth reading. Yet I wonder if the wit and charm of the telling, so abundantly on tap, do justice to the gravity of the subject matter. Perhaps these qualities serve to humanise an unspeakable experience. In rendering what was all too real as myth, however, Skibell creates a too comfortable distance between his text and the events he explores.