Lest We Forget

It is ironic that Lily Brett writes in an age that also gives space to proponents of the theory that the Holocaust never happened, who argue that Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen were props in a clever myth propagated by the Jews. Brett's family history says otherwise-members of her family, including her mother, went to the concentration camps. Many never returned.

Ruth Rothwax, the protagonist of Too Many Men, is like Brett herself a second-generation Holocaust survivor who deals in memories-innocuous if personal ones, since she heads a highly successful letter-writing service based in the US. Her father, Edek, has survived the horrors of the camps and watched his wife dwindle over the years. A shared trip to Poland reshuffles the relationship between father and daughter and forces them to confront not just their own weight of memory, but the indifference of a native land that has chosen denial over the healing of its wounds.

In her 40s, it is Ruth rather than her father who assumes the burden of tragedy, who is flayed at every streetcorner with the whispers of a past that is not her own but that she cannot deny. In an attempt to share the tortured history of her parents, she has stripmined the Holocaust until every brutal detail exists as vividly for her as it did for them.

Unknown to her father, she has an odd fellow-traveller who appears in sequences both comic and terrifying-the ghost of SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Rudolf Hoss, attempting with scant success to pass his sensitiv-ity training classes so that he can move on from limbo. Brett, incidentally, does not flinch from describing the cathartic release that washes over Ruth when she realises that she can inflict pain on the Nazi ghost.

Unlike Ruth, the affectionately drawn Edek has muted his ghosts and acquired the survivor's trick of living in the present. His years of deprivation are transmuted into an enormous appetite for food and for life; he has nurtured a tremendous capacity for good humour, love and adventure.

Their journey is not smooth: father and daughter grapple with nightmarish hotel rooms and the standard frustrations of the rich tourist in a poor country. They must also come to grips with the far more corrosive greed of those who would sell family goods, memories attached, back to them. They will encounter Poles who silently condone the rash of neo-Nazism by explaining that it stems from the ignorance of this generation, guides who will explain that the Holocaust was really not as bad as it had been portrayed.

But it would be shortsighted to label Too Many Men purely a Holocaust novel. The book unravels at a gently assured pace to reveal an astounding range of tones. The first section moves a trifle too slowly for comfort, but Brett manages to retain interest. Perseverance pays off, and in the end few novels have combined genuine pathos and equally bona fide comedy with such elan. Too Many Men has won the Best Book prize for the Pacific region and is a contender for the top prize in the Comm-onwealth Book Awards. It is a pity that Brett cannot be in New Delhi at the ceremonies this week to take a bow.