I would like to talk just a bit about the nature of humor. People don’t stop to realize that humor is tragedy, but it’s tragedy wearing a putty nose and slap shoes. After all the Greek masks are equal, humor and tragedy. My novels have a tendency to be rather comic on the surface, they’re all really very serious underneath.
And I came forward, for years, I wanted to do something on the Holocaust. My father lost his entire family left in Europe, he grew up in Southern Russia and the Ukraine. When the Nazis came through, they marched everybody to the forest and machine gunned them, they’re all gone.
So for years I’ve been wanting to do something not so much with the Holocaust as with the million and a half children who were murdered, which is really just an unconscionable figure, which has not really been dealt with, we’re dealing with the six million, but not the million and a half children who perished.
And the idea knocked around in my head for really decades and I couldn’t find a way to tell the story. Again, I said, there’s an idea for a story but what do you do with it, what do you do with it? Other books have been written on the Holocaust and for some reason I’m thinking of the dybbuk which is a Jewish ghost who comes back to possess someone.
And once I got that idea, then I could see in a flash what I had. I grew up with magicians and many of them are ventriloquists, I knew a lot about ventriloquism, the dummies and all that stuff. And I thought, I’ll have him possessed, he’ll be non-Jewish and I’ll have a Jewish dybbuk of course, a child, who was murdered in the Holocaust who comes back to gain revenge.
And possesses the ventriloquist because he would become the mouthpiece for what’s happened. So once I had that, I knew I had it. And as I wrote it, funny lines were coming, but they were lines of very bitter humor. But I was very worried as I wrote it that people would be offended to dare have a line or two of comedy in a book dealing with the Holocaust.
I set the story five years after the war and I waited until the reviews came out and every review commented on how welcome those flashes of humor in that grim subject, were. It is my favorite book of the books that I’ve written and I felt that I brought all of my skills to that book.
I couldn’t have written that book 20 years earlier, it took everything I had to write that book.