My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done, and my uncle told everyone they should have called me What Were You Thinking. I broke medicine bottles by crashing them together and let the neighbors' animals loose from pens. My mother said my father shouldn't beat such a small boy, but my father said that one misfortune was never enough for me, and my uncle told her that my kind of craziness was like stealing from the rest of the family.When we first meet Aron in The Book of Aron, his family is living in the countryside in 1930s Poland. He's a mischiefmaker, hopeless student, and forever on the verge of tears. When his father receives news that there's factory work to be had in Warsaw, they all move to the city, giving this Jewish family a ringside seat when the Germans invade. Through Aron's naive and accepting observations, the reader watches as all of Warsaw's Jews are corralled into the new Ghetto, have their rights stripped away, suffer starvation and disease, and ultimately, are marched to the train depot for deportation to the Treblinka death camp.
The human mind boggles at huge numbers like those lost in the Holocaust, but author Jim Shepard creates intimacy by focussing on one boy's wartime experience, and especially, by writing in Aron's own voice. The combination of clipped and run-on sentences sounds authentic to anyone who has read (and winced over) their kids' essays, and this had conflicting effects on me: I noted the art in writing authentically in the voice of an underschooled child, but without any exposition or introspection, it was all plot, plot, plot without emotion (except for Aron's uncontrollable crying that is often noted by other characters). There is genius in this device but it is a bit like reading a book-length essay by a middle-schooler. However, there were some nice (if infrequent) metaphorical touches, as in this passage, after another of Aron's family dies:
On my walk home the streets were very bad and icy. I slipped and fell more than once. It was after curfew but there was no moon and no one wanted to be out in the cold so no one saw me. I walked like I was part of my own funeral procession. At home I let myself in and stopped, as if there was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go in the face of the pictures in my head.It is apparent that Shepard put much research into the Warsaw Ghetto, and as Aron and his gang of friends steal and smuggle and do whatever it takes to survive and support their families, the details of time and place are subtle yet immersive. The food and clothes and stench and despair are so well drawn that when Lejkin – the collaborating Jewish policeman – is flexing his new boots to break them in, I remembered every poor child who was barefoot in the snow or who had shoes held together with twine or who had thought themselves lucky to steal another child's slippery wooden clogs. There was something archival about The Book of Aron, too, as though Shepard wanted to preserve Jewish oral traditions. Aron's mother would quiz him on Yiddish words (Did I know what beshart meant?), characters were often sharing expressions from their parents and grandparents (He said his mother used to say when it was sunny and he was particularly gloomy that not even a Jew could suffer on a day like today) and there were also many jokes told between characters (They say when Napoleon invaded Russia he wore a red jacket to hide his blood. When Hitler invaded, he wore brown pants.) Ultimately, though, it would seem that Shepard's primary intent was to preserve the story of the remarkable Pan Doktor Janusz Korczak.
Long before WWII, Korczak was a famous physician and essayist who promoted the rights of children. He eventually focussed his energies on running a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, and when the Ghetto was created, he was forced to relocate the children to within its walls. In The Book of Aron, Aron is aware of the doctor throughout his time in the Ghetto, and eventually, Aron finds himself in Korczak's care. Through Aron's eyes, Korczak is presented as a selfless and honourable man; definitely someone whose legacy demands preservation. As Korczak says of the Ghetto:
This is a prison. A plague ship. An asylum. A casino. A sprung trap. Bodies you clear from the street in the morning have piled up again by the evening.I have seen the debate about Holocaust fiction (that it should be avoided as sensationalist and exploitative; dismissed as horror tourism) and perhaps that is why Shepard placed his story in the eyes and mouth of a child – the matter-of-fact tone and lack of contemplation and conclusions doesn't read as fiction, and it feels like an essential tool for remembering details that might otherwise be at risk of being forgotten.
