‘Gotz and Meyer’: Family story, writing style are simply unforgettable

Many novels and non-fiction books about the Holocaust take place in Germany and Poland. But David Albahari's remarkable short novel, 'Gotz and Meyer” (Dalkey Press) focuses on a much smaller camp in Belgrade, Serbia. So small, in fact, that instead of a gas chamber there is just one hermetically sealed truck used to 'transport” prisoners from one camp to another. Except, of course, there is no second camp.

The unnamed narrator in 'Gotz and Meyer” learns about this truck when researching his family tree. Scores of his family members were killed in this camp, and 'my branch protruded like a young shoot stubbornly refusing to admit that the tree had withered.” The narrator decides that in addition to researching deceased and living family members he would also see what he could find on Gotz and Meyer, SS officials charged with driving the gas truck that killed his family.

But the research takes over his life, and he finds himself moving through his days 'split in an orderly and painless fashion into three parallel lives,” including his own, his vanished family, that of Gotz and Meyer.

The narrator's thoughts and actions move from one life to another, and Albahari does this beautifully by employing an intense, stream of consciousness writing style that allows for seamless transitions from one historical exploration to the next. A lesser writer would crumble under this intensity: with no chapters and no paragraph breaks there is scarcely time for the writer to take a breath. But Albahari is not a lesser writer. This style only accentuates the clarity of his language and perfection of his timing. The result is a remarkable, unforgettable novel.