Newark-born author raises moral questions

Not Me
by Michael Lavigne, Random House, 2005, 320 pages, $24.95

by Jack Fischel,
emeritus professor of history at Millersville University, Pennsylvania, the author of The Holocaust (Greenwood Press, 1998) and The Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust (Scarecrow Press, 1999).
Special to NJ Jewish News

Sidebars:
A journey of transformation (an NJJN interview with the author)
Book Excerpt

In the aftermath of World War II, many members of the Nazi SS escaped justice by assuming false identities, and many of them made their way to Latin America, where they assumed new lives. The most infamous of these Nazis was Adolf Eichmann. With the help of the Vatican, the chief implementer of the Final Solution fled to Argentina, where he assumed a new identity and lived a normal life before his capture by the Israeli agents and his trial before a court in Jerusalem.

In 1968, a fictional play was performed on Broadway based on the Eichmann trial — only with a twist. In The Man in the Glass Booth, the Eichmann character, as conceived by playwright Robert Shaw, made his way to the United States and assumed a Jewish identity.

Now, with a similar premise, comes the novel Not Me, in which the father character is also a successful Jewish businessman who may have been a former member of the SS.

This always interesting work of fiction is Newark native Michael Lavigne’s first novel. The plot centers around Mickey Rose, ne Michael Rosenheim, a famous comedian but unsuccessful father and failed husband, who is going through a divorce from his wife and suffering from a painful relationship with his son. Mickey’s problems are made more complicated by his father, Heshel Rosenheim, who, suffering from Alzheimer’s, is spending his last days in a nursing home. A successful businessman who survived the Holocaust, Heshel is well-known as a contributor to and tireless worker for Jewish causes, as well as a strong supporter of Israel. The character of Heshel Rosenheim is the personification of the Jewish macher, a pillar of the community admired and respected by all who know him. As in many contemporary father-son relationships, however, there is an estrangement between the two Rose/Rosenheims. The cause of the divide ranges from Mickey’s indifference to Jewish tradition to his sympathy for the cause of the Palestinians.

During a visit to the hospital, Mickey receives from Heshel a box that contains journals; it is with the receipt of this cache of notebooks that the novel takes a fascinating turn. After reluctantly deciding to read the journals, Mickey is shocked to learn that his father is really Heinrich Mueller, a member of the SS who was attached to the Budget and Construction Office. After receiving his silver death’s head for his cap, he had his rank raised to second lieutenant and was sent to do the books in Bergen-Belsen. Heshel writes in his journal that he liked numbers “and found to his amusement, that he had also picked up a great deal of the Jewish dialect as well, simply from interacting with the few inmates he had impressed into service as bookkeepers.”

Mitigating sins

As it becomes increasingly clear that the war  is turning against Germany and Allied troops approach the camp, Mueller, anticipating the arrests that would follow defeat, starves himself, shaves his head, and, with a needle dipped in ink, tattoos a number onto his forearm. When the British liberate Bergen-Belsen, Mueller convinces them he is a Jew named Heshel Rosenheim — the name of one of the Jewish bookkeepers. From Bergen-Belsen, Heinrich/Heshel makes his way to a kibbutz in prestate Palestine, and the journals reveal that he subsequently became a hero in Israel’s War of Independence.

Lavigne does not tells us how Rosenheim came to America nor how his hatred  toward Jews underwent so radical a change. Rather the novel invites the reader to grapple with the moral conundrum faced by the son toward his father; Mickey’s immediate response to the journal is rage. Can he forgive his father for lying? for his part as a perpetrator of the Holocaust? And what about Heshel’s contribution to the defeat of the Arabs in 1948 — does his heroism mitigate the sins of his SS past?

Although from the first page Not Me holds the reader’s interest, as a Holocaust novel it lacks credibility. Unlike the Shaw play, which was close enough to the Eichmann character to overlook the implausibility of his Jewish disguise, Lavigne has created a character who, as far as I know, does not have a counterpart in the bloody history of the Shoa. Kapos, yes. Ghetto Jewish police, yes. Jewish informers, yes. Jewish collaborators with the Nazis, even that yes. But someone like Heshel Rosenheim, a character  with all his baggage — highly unlikely. Yet, as a novel that raises all kinds of moral and philosophical questions surrounding the Shoa, it is well worth reading.

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Not Me author Michael Lavigne was born in Newark, grew up in New Jersey, and now lives in San Francisco. Reviewer Jack Fischel had a few questions for him.

Jack Fischel: As far as I know, a character like Not Me’s Heshel Rosenheim does not exist in the annals of Holocaust history. What was the inspiration for creating that character in your novel?

Michael Lavigne: Nothing historical. I have always been interested in the conundrum of identity: How do you know who you are? How do you get beneath the surface of actions? It’s fun to turn things inside out, to try out the opposite. In this case, what if a devout Jew is, or was, a Nazi? Explore what that means. But in terms of how I came up with it, my wife revealed to me that her entire extended family hid the fact that she was Jewish until she herself figured it out when she was 17 years old. The idea of such a secret self was the real origin of this novel.

JF: Are aspects of the novel autobiographical?

ML: Yes, but not the obvious things — no Nazis in my past. My father was born in Newark, not Berlin. There are no Germans at all in my family. In fact, my childhood was completely normal and mostly uneventful. I did, however, borrow strongly for the locations — my childhood home after we moved to Millburn, my parents’ condo in Florida. The kibbutz in the story is based on one I lived on briefly many years ago. Also some of the events in Michael’s — Not Me’s main character — life reflect interior experiences of my own. For instance, the character Michael’s flubbing the magic ring trick he did for “show and tell” and turning it into a triumph of sorts — something similar happened to me, but it wasn’t a magic trick.

JF: Why did you not trace Heshel’s immigration to the United States and describe how he became an important “macher” in the Jewish community?

ML: I think the story I needed to tell is complete when Heshel accepts his new identity as his own — although in some earlier drafts I did write about these missing years.

JF: My review questions the plausibility of Heshel’s sojourn from Bergen-Belsen to Israel to America. How would you respond to such criticism?

ML: I don’t usually respond to criticism, but I do think people reinvent themselves all the time. The question is, how authentic is that invention? Of course you can ask the same of one’s original persona — how authentic is it? What is sincerity? People come to believe their inventions, forget whole eras of their former lives. I certainly have. If there is any character that really is me in this book, it is Heshel. In some strange way, his journey is mine. A journey of transformation. The real question is, do you think transformation is possible? Some days, I say no; some days, I say yes. Maybe that’s why I wrote Not Me — to ask myself, and you, that question. By the way, I’ve had more than one person come up to me and say they knew of Nazi criminals who hid out as Jews. Of course, that is not the same as saying they became Jews — but then again, Robert McNamara became a peacenik! In any event, I hope you enjoyed the book, plausible or not.

JF: You were born in Newark; did you grow up in “Jewish Newark”?

ML: Yes, I suppose I did. My grandfather Samuel Lavigne was a pharmacist and a Newark ward boss in the local Republican Party. Some old-timers will remember my uncle’s shoe store on Bergen Street. We belonged to Temple B’nai Abraham [now in Livingston], and I went to Hebrew school there. My rabbis were Joachim Prinz and, later, his son, Johnny. My father was very active in Jewish life, was an officer in the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs. Mom was in Hadassah, the sisterhood — the whole nine yards. We had a large family, and most everyone lived in New Jersey, and we celebrated all the holidays. We lived first on Milford Avenue and then on Renner Avenue, the same neighborhood Philip Roth describes in The Plot Against America. Later we moved to Millburn. As a teen I got very involved with Young Judaea, which had its regional offices in Newark. After high school, I spent a year in Israel, and then went on to college — and returned to New Jersey for visits. I still do, by the way.

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Book Excerpt

Which side?

“THEY THINK you should go to hospice,” I said. “Are you ready for that?”

“I’m happy here,” he said. “I won’t take long.”

“Oh stop!” I said.

Again he laughed. “I’m telling you, death is nothing, Mikey. Nothing. After what I’ve seen.”

Finally! I thought.

“Then tell me what you’ve seen.”

“Everything a man could see. Everything you should never see.”

“The camps.”

“The camps.”

I held my breath and forced myself to take his hand, this hand that pulled me back to safety when I leaned out too far that time on the Staten Island Ferry; the same that caught me as I careened out of control down those rapids on the Russian River, snatching me out like a ripe plum just before I hit the rocks; and the same that often was raised in anger but never, ever came down, and yet was strong enough to crush walnuts in its bare palm when, after the dishes were cleared, the grown-ups sat around the table talking politics. It was the same hand that today was like flatbread, dry, brittle, lifeless — I could have cracked it in half with a flick of my wrist, and now I held it and waited. A minute ago I might have been repulsed by this shadow of a hand, and by this rancid smell that seemed to float around him, by the sunken, bony eyes — but now I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all. I felt something else. I couldn’t exactly say. But I sensed I was closer to him in this depressingly stupid, two-bit nursing home than maybe I’d been in my whole adult life.

“Tell me,” I said as gently as I could, “in the camps. Which side were you on?”

He looked at me for a long time, and nodded as if he had told me the answer, but his lips had never moved.

“Why won’t you tell me?” I whispered.

“Like everybody else,” he barely said, “I was on my own side.”

— From Not Me by Michael Lavigne