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through realistic visual details as through the subjective, ambiguous sensation of someone being shot in the back of the head without any prior warning. Similar to the scenes of massacre in Rushdie and García Márquez, Skibell’s also lacks specific words denoting physical violence, such as bullets or blood, and relies more on the affective charge of the experience. Most fantasy elements in Skibell’s novel are symbolic of trauma: for example, when the same soldier who apparently shot Chaim in the beginning of the novel (we are not shown or told about any shooters at that point) sneaks up on him saying, “One step more, and I’ll kill you again” (98), the scene becomes an indication of the repetition compulsion that characterizes all acting out of trauma (by victims and perpetrators alike, however different their ethical status). Too horrible to have been rationalized when it occurred, the original event keeps returning with the same affective impact that it had the first time.
While Malamud directed his satire against the religious superstitions and intolerance of Russian Orthodox Christians, Skibell portrays a Polish family’s complicity with the persecution of the town’s Jewish minority. The Serafinskis show no pangs of conscience while enjoying the home, furniture, and household items that used to belong to Chaim Skibelski only hours before his execution. During World War II, the attitudes of the Poles and other European nations toward the Nazis’ genocidal practices oftentimes ranged from indifference to passive acquiescence or even active participation in acts of repression and violence—which might constitute yet another argument against the barbaric character of any imaginative literature after Auschwitz (according to Theodor Adorno). Before dogmatically foreclosing any new avenues for fictive reconstructions of the Holocaust by contemporary or future, Jewish or non-Jewish writers, one should also consider the alternatives: forgetting, trivialization, or even flat denial of the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi genocide.
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Probably no other shock chronotope has maintained more of its poignant actuality and horrendous impact on the human psyche than