The Book of Ghosts by Reed Farrel Coleman Page A

Leah drove down the Long Island Expressway, the skyline of Manhattan and the prospect of the rare book auction looming before him. And as they did, he asked himself the same question he had asked himself a thousand, ten thousand, a million times in the wake of the camp’s liberation at the hands of the Red Army. Why? Why: three letters, one syllable, a single sound, but the most complex question in the universe when it came to the human heart. Why didn’t he just keep his trap shut when the Jewish resettlement agency people came to interview him in the hospital? Why spin the tale of Isaac Becker and The Book of Ghosts when he might have gotten to America anyway?
    He was not without answers, reasonable answers, ones that sometimes let him sleep the whole night through. He wanted no part of the Soviets. He had witnessed their barbarity first-hand and thought them not much better than the Nazis. He had no desire to build a new life in the ruins and gloom of a bloodsoaked Europe, nor did he have the zeal to fight the British for a homeland in Palestine. America. He wanted a new world in which to make something of the shreds of whatever remained of himself. Jacob Weisen thought if he could just make himself seem heroic—the Americans, he knew, had a weakness for heroes—he might stand a better chance of making it across the Atlantic. So he took the facts and spliced them with lies and embellishments to create the myth of his salvation. Only now, with Manhattan but minutes away, it felt much more like damnation.
    â€œYour name is Jacob Weisen.” The raven-haired American woman from the agency had read from his request form. She was actually quite beautiful, delicate, and spoke passable Yiddish. “It says here you want to be resettled in the United States or Canada.”
    â€œUnited States only. See, I wrote the United States there for my second choice too, but they crossed it out and made me write Canada.”
    She smiled in spite of herself. “Why America only, Jacob?” she asked, giving him the opening he’d been hoping for.
    And thus Weisen told the story of how his brave childhood friend, Isaac Becker, the storyteller—” Even the SS men called him that”—had written a book during his year and a half in Birkenau and the other Auschwitz satellite camps. That Becker’s book was a novel featuring a protagonist known only as the Gypsy.
    â€œYou see, in the book,” Jacob explained to the American woman, “the Gypsy is visited by the ghosts of the people he knew in the camps before they were gassed. The ghosts tell their stories to the Gypsy who commits them to memory to tell to the world if he himself should survive. Isaac never told me the book’s title, but I came to think of it as The Book of Ghosts. ”
    â€œThis is fascinating, Jacob, but I don’t see how this relates to you or your request for resettlement in the United—”
    Weisen cut her off, continuing his tale. “You see, because Isaac was such a wonderful storyteller, he sort of became the personal property of Oberleutnant Kleinmann. He was Kleinmann’s pet and it was Kleinmann who gave Isaac the writing tablet and pen in the first place so he could write down his stories. What that bastard Kleinmann didn’t know was that Isaac was really using the tablet to write The Book of Ghosts. He only pretended to be reading stories from the book to placate the Nazi pig. In exchange for the stories, the lieutenant kept Isaac from the showers. The charade worked until Isaac told a story Kleinmann was so taken with that he demanded to have the tablet back from Isaac and to keep it for his own. Isaac protested for a time, but what choice did he have, really? In the end, he gave the book to Kleinmann who just glanced at it, saw that the first page had some Hungarian on it, and locked it in his desk drawer.”
    â€œStill, as captivating as this all is, I don’t understand