arts & entertainment Moving The Needle On Holocaust Humor Martin Amis' new novel is the latest entry in a cultural trend to probe the Shoah with satire. British novelist Martin Amis' new book, Steve Lipman New York Jewish Week I n a German concentration camp, the com- mandant and an officer of the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the Nazis' SS para- military unit, are discussing the "selection" of Jewish prisoners to live or die. "There was no selection. They were all certainties for the gas," one Nazi tells the other. Rapes? "We do something much nastier than that," comes the answer. We get the pretty ones, and we do medical experiments on them ... We turn them into little old ladies. Then hunger turns them into little old men." "Would you agree that we couldn't treat them any worse?" "Oh, come on. We don't eat them." This dialogue takes place early in The Zone of Interest (Knopf), British writer Martin Amis' new (it was released in the fall of 2014), and controversial, novel set in the fictional Kat Zet I camp, which is a fictional branch of Auschwitz. (Kat and Zet are the letters by which a Konzentrationlager, or concentration camp, is known in German.) Most of the action in the book's 295 pages takes place through the eyes of, and in the words of, the camp commandant and a Nazi civil servant; a Jewish prisoner is a secondary character. As in a real concentration camp, there is death and torture, but it is largely implied rather than depicted. Instead, Amis, 65, and one of England's most prominent writers (twice a finalist for the country's prestigious Booker Prize for fiction), largely centers his novel around such everyday stuff as petty romances and office politics. Amis' book is a departure from standard fictional books about the Holocaust. His perpetrators, instead of the victims, tell the story. They are shown to be neither bloodthirsty monsters nor sympathetic figures, but as regular people with regular foibles — clueless, morally deaf people. They see their lives, in venues of bureaucra- cy-regulated cruelty, through a lens of detached irony. HI The novel contains many examples of sarcasm, of comic hyperbole, of humor, even on such serious topics as murder and anti-Semitism. Even the cover is untradi- tional: a drawing of red roses on barbed wire. The Zone of Interest is the latest example — a major one, given Amis' stature in the world of literary fiction — of the increasing convergence of two phenomena once consid- ered inherently contradictory: the Holocaust and humor. "We're living in an age of irony ... an age of [late-night comic commentators] Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart:' observed Thane Rosenbaum, a son of Holocaust survivors whose own novels frequently touch on Holocaust themes. Rosenbaum cited the 1949 statement by German sociologist-philosopher Theodor Adorn that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric:' In other words, no form of art could accu- rately deal with unprecedented genocide. "You don't write novels inside concentra- tion camps," Rosenbaum said. "You don't make art of atrocity:' For years, writers inspired by the messages of the Holocaust would write about the after- math — postwar Germany, or the camps' psychological effect on survivors. Or, in the case of Sophie's Choice, the experiences of a non-Jew in a concentration camp. "It was very rare to violate the rule Rosenbaum said. Then, various writers and filmmakers and other creative individuals "chipped away at it. The further we got away from Auschwitz, the less sacred it became:' The most famous example was The Producers, Mel Brooks' 1968 movie about a pair of Broadway charlatans whose doomed- to-failure show about the Third Reich fea- tured the memorable "Springtime for Hitler" song-and-dance extravaganza, and the 2001 Broadway version of The Producers that fol- lowed. In this spirit was Roberto Benigni's 1997 Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful, a comedy- drama set in a concentration camp. "You can laugh at Hitler because you can cut him down to normal size Brooks said in an interview with Germany's Spiegel magazine. "By using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths" Lawrence L. Langer, emeritus professor of English at Simmons College in Boston and set in a Nazi death camp, incorporates an amount of ironic humor. the author of several books about Holocaust literature, disagreed about the place of "Holocaust humor" in a post-Holocaust set- ting. "I don't think farce works with the Holocaust," he said. Humor, by definition, diffuses the true atrocity of an event being depicted. "I don't think it's a good phenom- enon:' A novel by a writer of Amis' stature raises the place of humor in a Holocaust context to a higher level of acceptability. "It signifies that Adorno's admonition is off the table," Rosenbaum said. "The Holocaust is open for business in any art form:' "It's fair game for anyone said Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and author. Amis, who had set his 1991 novel, Time's Arrow, in the same fictional concentration camp and has conducted extensive Holocaust research and has condemned anti-Semitism in the contemporary United Kingdom, fol- lows other recent examples of boundary- testing Holocaust humor. Er ist Wieder Da (He's Back) is a German novel about a Rip Van Winkle-ish Hitler who awakens in modern-day Germany. A Brazilian play, Holoclownsto, is about clowns in a concentration camp. An American play, The Timekeepers, is about a Jewish watch- maker and a homosexual German man who bond in a concentration camp through their mutual love of opera and their sense of humor. All are sympathetic to the Third Reich's victims. While humor in the context of the Shoah Jews Nate Bloom Special to the Jewish News Remembering Roger Last August, the documentary Life Itself, about the late film critic Roger Ebert, had a brief theatrical run. The film will be shown at 9 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 4, on CNN. Ebert became famous as one half of Siskel & Ebert, the television program (1975-1999) featuring two dueling Chicago newspaper film critics who gave a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" regarding new film releases. Much of the film is dedicated to 26 their relationship, which was often as acerbic in real life as it was on TV. However, the film does cover Ebert's moving memorial TV tribute to Gene Siskel (1945-1999). The film's director, Steve James (Hoop Dreams), said in an interview that their relationship "wasn't all vitriol and conflict; there was a bond between them, too." By way of evidence, he cites one outtake reel in which the duo, knowing their comments wouldn't make the air, berate the WASPs (in a mostly comic way) for "running the coun- try" and their other faults – as compared to "real folks' like Jews (Siskel) and Catholics (Ebert). New On TV I saw the trailer for the new fairy- tale-themed musical comedy series Galavant, and I was quite amused and impressed. The series debuts at 8 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 4, on ABC. Set in medieval England, it fol- lows the adventures of Galavant, a handsome knight who tries to win back the affection of his sweet- heart, whom the king fancies. That's the basic plot, but really this show is part Monty Python and the Holy Grail and part Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights. It was created and written by Dan Fogelman (Cars; Crazy, Stupid Love), 50, who even manages to work in some explicitly Jewish humor. The really funny songs were penned by the top Disney songwriting team of composer Alan Menken, 65, and lyricist Glenn Slater, 46. The main cast is mostly made up of lesser-known British actors, but guest-starring are some big- gies: Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey), Weird Al Yankovic and Ricky Gervais, among others. Contact Nate Bloom at middleoftheroadl@aol.com .