In the skilled hands of the Dutch author Marcel Möring, “In a Dark Wood” (HarperCollins Publishers, $27.99) confirms that a work of fiction can and, as is the case here, does have the power to render immediacy to the tragic repercussions of the Holocaust, at times more effectively than the telling of history.
With gorgeous prose and serpentine sentences—reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and James Joyce’s Molly Bloom soliloquy—that rise and fall on the page like symphonies, Marcel Möring tempts the reader to rewarding crescendos, philosophical tours and detours into the introspections of his characters, their deepest and most complicated inner struggles as Jews who experienced the horrors of extermination.
Jacob Noah emerges out of a hole in the ground where he has been hiding for three years to discover that his mother, father, and brother have perished in the Nazi camps. The family shop, “Abraham Noah Shoes (also repair),” has been confiscated and renamed “Hilbrandts Aryan Bookshop.” A few dead flies lie in the window next to a book with the telling title of “Mother, Tell Us About Adolf Hitler.”
The engine that drives Jacob Noah’s existence is “revenge for everything. He wants to pull out the piece of rope that holds up his trousers brush the earth to the side and fuck the damned field of the damned farmers to avenge himself… bile wells up in him… Never again.” And revenge can only be achieved by becoming successful, a force to reckon with, a man who can’t be avoided.
And success he certainly achieves, so much so that he “grows into a person of mythical proportions,” the most influential entrepreneur in the sleepy, Dutch town of Assen. But neither his wealth, nor his wife and three daughters, manage to fill the empty void left by his enormous loss, nor assuage the guilt that taints his every act, particularly his sexual encounters. Driven by the need “to destroy all that is clean and pure because what was clean and pure has been destroyed,” he is unable to accept tenderness. In the end, despite all his efforts to expunge all traces of his past “the past doesn’t pass,” his Jewishness sticks to him like second skin, and the place he yearns for most remains the “hole in the bog … where nothing was everything and he couldn’t lose it because he had already lost everything.”
On the night of the TT Circuit motorcycle racing, when Assen comes to life with drunken revelry, Jacob Noah embarks on a Ulysses-like voyage through town, led by the Jew of Assen, a mythical peddler who attempts to help Jacob Noah face his inner demons and come to terms with the repercussions of his past. On the same night, Jacob Noah’s beloved daughter, Chaja, and Marcus Kolpa, her estranged, tortured Jewish boyfriend wander through town in search of each other. In the process, their paths converge and diverge as they meander through the beer-infused, dream-like darkness of town that mirrors their personal struggles and collective misunderstandings.
It would be a disservice to reveal the twists and turns of this fantastical night and cheat the reader from enjoying the journey of discovery as these four wonderfully drawn characters grapple with their limitations, inability to accept love, and the hand history dealt them. Suffice it to say that despite the many tragic historical and philosophical matters tackled here, this is not a dark novel of angst, but an often humorous, highly enjoyable, and suspenseful story of love and loss and redemption that will continue to resonate with the reader long after the last page is read.
Dora Levy Mossanen is a regular contributor of fiction reviews for The Jewish Journal.
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