REVIEW
BOOK
The multiple forms of the
banalization of the Holocaust .
The Memory Monster ,
Sarid , Yishai ( 2020 ). Restless Books
David González Historian , professor at the University of Barcelona | Project manager at the EUROM
“ The Memory Monster ”, by Yishai Sarid ( Tel Aviv , 1965 ), originally published in Hebrew in 2017 , has been published in several languages since 2019 . The English , Catalan and Spanish versions all came out in 2020 .
In this novel , the author analyses , criticizes and denounces a key feature of his own social reality : the trivialization of the Holocaust through its spaces of memory , and through the various mechanisms of memorial transmission , both in his homeland , Israel , and abroad . This trivialization takes the form of a memory monster .
The book ’ s early pages clearly presage the problems that will emerge as the plot develops . Our protagonist , a Holocaust historian who works as a guide in Poland , chooses his speciality not due to any sense of vocation but for purely practical reasons . He would have liked to study some other period of history , but , in order to find work , he finds himself obliged to specialize in a productive field . Thus , from the start of the book , the Holocaust is depicted as a powerful cultural industry offering tempting job opportunities in the field of historical dissemination . Thus , through his connections with the Yad Vashem Memorial , the protagonist qualifies as a tour guide and begins to work accompanying groups , mostly Israeli teenagers on school trips , through the Holocaust spaces of memory in Poland .
The continuous contact with adolescents presents him with a dilemma . As a committed historian , he concentrates his efforts on helping his charges to understand what happened , but the attitudes of the groups he takes around the sites eventually make him loathe his
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Observing Memories ISSUE 4