Three Novels, Three Different Responses to Groupthink

“It is up to us to write our own history,” declares the organizer of the desperate project at the heart of Lauren Grodstein’s latest novel, WE MUST NOT THINK OF OURSELVES (Algonquin, 304 pp., $34). He’s speaking on a bleak afternoon in one of the bleakest places in Poland, the Warsaw ghetto in December 1940. Those he will secretly assemble in the upstairs room of a library are intent on preserving the biographies of at least some of the hundreds of thousands of Jews imprisoned by the Nazis in three square kilometers of the city.

Inspired by the Oneg Shabbat Archive that was buried in milk cans before the destruction of the ghetto, Grodstein has constructed an absorbing, heartbreaking narrative around the efforts of one invented participant in the actual archive project. Adam Paskow, a secular Jew who was once a respected English teacher, now shares a small apartment with two married couples and five young boys. A childless widower whose Christian wife was the daughter of a well-connected Polish businessman, Paskow struggles with memories of his past life — and with his growing attraction to the woman who sleeps with her husband just beyond the narrow alcove that has become his new home.

Grodstein builds tension into her storytelling by contrasting the details of the interviews Paskow gathers with agonizing glimpses of the characters’ daily activities amid the ghetto’s steadily deteriorating conditions, increasingly shadowed by the prospect of deportation. As her characters’ hopes for salvation flicker and dim, they engage in ever more dangerous activities. A 16-year-old girl uses her body as bait for a soldier while a 12-year-old boy risks torture by smuggling food from the forbidden zone. Fending off threats from his collaborationist father-in-law, Paskow strikes up an acquaintance with one of the Poles guarding the ghetto walls. Can anyone be trusted? Will any of them survive?

Walter Kempowski’s World War II testimony comes from the other side of the divide. First published in 1971 but only now available in an English translation, AN ORDINARY YOUTH (New York Review Books, 476 pp., paperback, $19.95) is a disturbing rendition, as its translator, Michael Lipkin, writes, of “the perspective that created the conditions for a genocide in which the bourgeois world depicted here was entirely complicit, despite its pretensions to the contrary.”