My father used to quote a saying among Russian peasants: “Never pray for a better czar.” These words reflect the fatalism of people who have no hope, who know that any change in their situation is unlikely to be for the better.
That saying could easily come out of the mouth of the narrator of “The Book of Aron,” a sad yet brilliant novel by Jim Shepard, who lives in Williamstown and teaches at Williams College. Aron is a young Jewish boy. He turns 9 near the start of the book, in 1938, and we hear his voice until 1942.
Aron moves from the Polish countryside to Warsaw just as the Germans invade Poland. His family has always faced hardship, and he has felt little love in his life.
At first, the German occupation of Warsaw gives the boy a measure of freedom. He has never been good at schoolwork. Leaving school to join a group of children who scavenge and smuggle goods seems almost like a step up. For once this child, seen as useless to most of his family, can contribute to the household.
As the months go by, however, Aron’s life worsens. The various police forces — German, Polish, Jewish — in charge of his people’s fate become aware of the activities of the gangs and crack down on them.
The boy loses his friends one by one.
He also loses his family. His father and brothers are taken away, supposedly to a labor camp. His mother dies of typhus. The physical world around him is narrowing as well; the Germans render the Warsaw ghetto smaller, more limited, and more perilous.
Eventually the fictional Aron makes a new connection, with a real-life personage. Janusz Korczak was a doctor and humanitarian who ran a prominent orphanage in Warsaw.
Korczak took his mission to protect the youngsters under his care very seriously. He viewed children — particularly those children in those times — as the most underprivileged of human beings.
“The Book of Aron” isn’t easy to read. No Holocaust story is. It is well worth reading, however, for the texture Jim Shepard brings to life in the ghetto. Shepard writes beautifully about an ugly experience.
I have read a great deal about the suffering of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime, including materials about the Warsaw ghetto. This novel makes that experience more real than most of the documentary materials I have encountered.
Aron’s matter-of-fact tone lays bare the suffering around him: the dirt, the disease, the brutality, the despair. His story may be fiction, but it feels very real.
Tinky Weisblat is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook” and “Pulling Taffy.” Visit her website: www.TinkyCooks.com
