The Memory Monster

"Award-winning Yishai Sarid's slender, elegantly translated novel grapples with some mighty questions, among them the myriad ways in which the Holocaust might be seen to have shaped Israel's culture, and the complex existential politics of memorialisation and Holocaust education.... Where the book excels is in its readiness to court controversy without surrendering nuance, and in place of moralising it offers questioning that's as necessary as it is unsettling."

-Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian

"The Memory Monster is one of the great Israeli novels to have been published in translation in recent years. Sarid's book is wonderfully subversive, darkly humorous; riveting, challenging, and thought-provoking. The voice-captured well in English by Yardenne Greenspan-is finely balanced, teetering on the edge as the memory monster sinks its teeth deeper and deeper into Sarid's protagonist. The Memory Monster is a novel that demands to be read and deserves our attention."

-Liam Hoare, Fathom

"[A] record of a breakdown, an impassioned consideration of memory and its risks, and a critique of Israel's use of the Holocaust to shape national identity.... Sarid's unrelenting examination of how narratives of the Holocaust are shaped makes for much more than the average confessional tale."

-Publishers Weekly

"Sarid's incisive critique of Holocaust memorialization, the corruption within it, and the perverse forms of nationalism it can engender is courageous.... It unabashedly critiques the link between Holocaust remembrance culture and the tendency of certain strains of Jewish and particularly Israeli culture to overrate the centrality of aggressive survivorship to Jewish identity, and how this culture in turn nurtures the militarization, settler colonialism, and Islamophobia that combine to create the perfect storm of violent right-wing nationalism.... Nuanced and subtle at every level."

-Miranda Cooper, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The Memory Monster is shattering, brilliant, disturbing, and very important. Sarid's background as a lawyer makes the narrator's arguments-and his falling apart-all the more disturbing when his logic fails. How can the horrors of the Holocaust be taught, remembered? A powerful novel."

-Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions

"The short but powerful novel raises the question of how far we let the horrors of the past infiltrate our present-day lives.... The Memory Monster is not an easy book to read but its message is important to hear."

-Ellis Shuman, The Times of Israel

"Numerous powerful passages evoke [the narrator's] increasingly vivid interior experiences of what happened at the camps.... The book feels like real life in its humble details, but even more so in its implied conclusion that no ultimate actions, no final solutions, are ever truly available to us.... It makes a valuable contribution to the present generation of Holocaust literature. It adds to the hope that the memory of the monster may linger unto the nth generation."

-Jon Sobel, Blogcritics