‘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.’ So begins, with bitter Jewish humour, this involving book set largely in the Warsaw ghetto.
There is a hint of unnerving pastiche in this, but it is a sentence that finds an echo in the compassionate words of Jim Shepard’s hero, Janusz Korczak, in the final sentence of the book.
Korczak was a real figure, a paediatrician who ran an orphanage in Warsaw, moved with it into the ghetto and, despite being offered several chances of escape, stayed with his charges when transported to the extermination camp at Treblinka.
Aron, the young first-person narrator, is the third son of poor Jews in a Polish village near the Lithuanian border. His father, a sardonic figure who provides moments of black humour, ‘was always off looking for money’. His mother, put-upon and loving, washes other people’s floors. It is noted that Aron ‘only looks out for himself’. It is a recurring truth, of which the boy is both aware and ashamed (‘Everyone,’ he says later on, ‘claimed I was selfish because I took too long on the toilet’). He is the polar opposite of the selfless Korczak.
When his father is offered better work in Warsaw, the family moves from rural shtetl to urban slum. Then things get worse. The horrors are described from the child’s point of view; there is no reflection, no judgment. This is what the world is like. The pared prose is affecting.
Once the Jews are walled in and the ghetto established, Aron becomes part of a gang of children, two of whom are girls.
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