Bram Presser: The Book of Dirt (a novel)

The Book of Dirt – Bram Presser –  Text Publishing Company (Australia) – Paperback – 9781925240269 – 325 pages – $15.95 – September 11, 2018 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Personal and family history for most contemporary Jews is frequently fraught. Most of us have relatives who disappeared without a trace, except for scattered entries in German records of extermination. Some fewer of us have had living relatives whose lives were entwined with and defined by the Holocaust, almost always in horrific and devastating ways.

Bram Presser, an Australian punk rocker and practicing attorney who also happens to be a brilliant writer, spent eight years working on this novel, The Book of Dirt. It is a fabulous story that explores the real life story of Presser’s grandfather, Jakub Rand, from the 1920s onward through the Holocaust and beyond. Presser addresses history in all its complexity with the only tool that could possibly make sense of it – imagination.

Presser starts with family stories and personal legends, combined with archival research and interviews to create this novel. Of course it becomes partly fact, partly fiction. Some is memory and much is imagined.

The relatively large number of characters and the movement between places can be confusing for the reader, but Bram Presser’s grandfather, Jakub Rand, and his grandmother, Dasa Roubicek, and their immediate family are the focus of the book, and their story of survival shines through. The pain and suffering was immense and the power of humanity was as well.

You do not need to be Jewish to find this novel compelling and real. All of us can share through this novel what it means to find hope, and for the descendants of survivors of terror and loss to try to understand the stories of their forebears. This is a wonderful and transformative literary work.

The Book of Dirt has won a number of well-deserved awards in Australia. Bram Presser was born in Melbourne in 1976. He has been a punk rocker, an academic and a criminal attorney. He writes the blog Bait For Bookworms and is a founding member of Melbourne Jewish Book Week. His stories have appeared in Vice Magazine, The Sleepers Almanac, Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing and Higher Arc. In 2011, Bram won The Age Short Story Award. Presser’s own website is very active and includes a great deal of material related to the stories behind The Book of Dirt; it is worthwhile to explore.

‘Meet Bram Presser, aged five, smoking a cigarette with his grandmother in Prague. Meet Jakub Rand, one of the Jews chosen to assemble the Nazi’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Such details, like lightning flashes, illuminate this audacious work about the author’s search for the grandfather he loved but hardly knew. Working in the wake of writers like Modiano and Safran Foer, Presser brilliantly shows how fresh facts can derail old truths, how fiction can amplify memory. A smart and tender meditation on who we become when we attempt to survive survival.’
Mireille Juchau

I hope you enjoy listening to Bram Presser talk about The Book of Dirt, a book I strongly recommend you seek out and read.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Christina Thompson: Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

978-1596911277 – Bloomsbury USA – $15.00 – paperback (ebook editions available)

Christina Thompson’s Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All – A New Zealand Story gets one’s immediate attention for its outstanding title, of course.  How could one resist?  This tightly woven memoir was recommended to me by a writer friend who admires stylish writing and it certainly does offer some very fine writing.

But I was most drawn to it at the outset, because Ms. Thompson is an anthropologist, a field of study I have always loved.  Early in her career, she lived and worked in Australia, and traveled to nearby Pacific islands, including New Zealand, where she met and eventually married a Maori, the point where this book really starts to take off.

The title of the book comes from a statement made by Maoris at an early meeting with some European explorers.  It perfectly stands for the cultural gulf between the two peoples and the lack of understanding each had for the other’s entirely foreign culture.  This theme of misunderstanding, and of culturally determined viewpoints, runs throughout the entire book.  Because she is now directly connected to the Maori/Polynesian worldview by dint of marriage, and because she has an anthropologist’s ability to look beyond her own viewpoint, Thompson is able to navigate the intricacies of cross-cultural interaction better than most writers.

Thompson talks about her family, children, American and Maori relations as part of the effort to understand differences, and to explain behavior.  It’s inevitable that Maori and Polynesian cultures are poorly understood in either Europe or America, where the author and her family now lives.  In this memoir, author Thompson looks at the past and the present through the lens of contact and perception with a powerful incisiveness.  Sometimes we are lulled by the commonplace story of the present, and then are shaken awake by its connections to a violent past.  The historical Maoris were a violent and warlike people, and their collision with the equally violent (and self-centered) Europeans of the colonial imperial era created a long period of difficulty for the native people of New Zealand and surrounding regions of the Pacific.

This book is one I can recommend to anyone who wants to see beyond her or his own experience, to learn the limits of anyone’s personal perspective as it is part of a cultural construct, and to peek into the different ones that are around us in our now hyper-connected universe.  Another fine book I am pleased to recommend.  And I do think our conversation expands on the ideas that are present in the book.

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review. Her essays and articles have appeared in a number of magazines and journals, including Vogue, American Scholar, the Journal of Pacific History, Australian Literary Studies, and in the 1999, 2000, and 2006 editions of Best Australian Essays. She lives near Boston with her husband and three sons.You can read excerpts from this book, find some very interesting resources and learn more about the author and her work at www.comeonshore.com.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download