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(1997) and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer (1966). Although the two Jewish-American authors did not witness the Holocaust firsthand, they re-create its horrors in their novels by relying on their traumatic imaginations. Most critics of post-Holocaust writing tend to question the authority of a writer’s voice by his ethnicity and/or the nature of his connection to the event. Malamud’s novel is set in Czarist Russia, in 1911 Kiev, and its plot was inspired by the historic Mendel Beilis blood libel trial. By prolepsis, Malamud connects early twentieth-century anti-Semitism to the crimes of Nazi Germany that followed only a few decades later: the arbitrary arrest of the novel’s main character, Yakov Bok, his two-and-a-half years of abusive detention, and the concocted accusations to which he is subjected are all harbingers of the atrocities of the Holocaust. In spite of its preponderantly realistic scenes, the narrative incorporates a number of fantasy elements particularly in the last scenes of the prison episode: a succession of dream sequences tends to blur the borderline between reality and imagination as readers are given little or no notice of the shifts between the two ontological levels of the text—an ambiguity characteristic of magical realist writing. Fantasy has the suggestive power of making the reality of the plot more vivid in the readers’ eyes. Malamud seems to be aware of the importance of illusion in our perceptions of the world: when in one of his out-of-this-world experiences Yakov shoots Czar Nicholas the Second, he actually proposes an alternative history that would start with What if? “Guessing what reality is” was once acknowledged by Malamud as his way of living his life; in the novel, however, it could also describe what Yakov does many times while in prison. However, one cannot speak of pure fantasy if a dream sequence interrupts the character’s moments of waking: whenever the ontological status of the fantasy scene becomes questionable, I discern the magical realist writing mode.
Skibell pushes the limits of imaginative fiction even farther than Malamud did. The very first scene in A Blessing on the Moon is indicative of the narrator-character’s extreme trauma: nothing can probably be more traumatic than the experience of violent death. The narrative voice of the victim, Chaim Skibelski, is even more understated than that of Malamud’s narrator as it renders the scene of his execution not so much