Review: Nightfather by Carl Friedman

Nightfather is a moving book full of allegory and brilliance. What makes it truly special amongst the thousand other books in the field lies in the manner in which the story is told. The story, as you must be wondering, concerns the holocaust. That dark, oft-depressing subject makes the author's method more curious still. The method, which I have lingered in the telling to make the tasting sweeter, concerns a child. A child's mind, specifically through the which, the story is filtered. Nightfather tells of families and their stresses, it tells of war, and bone-deep grudges that can not be forgotten. Also, it has a built-in social commentary on the passing down of hatred. All elements are changed to crystal clarity through the eyes of a child.

I do not mean to say that Nightfather is some journal written by a prepubescent half-illiterate who was swept up in the current of the times quite against their will and yielded to the page in a fit all their sorrow and frustration and rewrote the wretched thing twenty years later with no genuine memories of it left save those suppressed; rather - and I admit that all of this is quite a mouthful - I speak of a man who, in a memoir-ish fashion, published a remarkable work that deserves a genre all its own lying somewhere in that thought-provoking tangle of philosophy, fairy-tales, and mind-crushing horror.

Nightfather is a tale - a tale more than half-true - of a child who was shaped and scarred by the stories of a father who survived the holocaust. I would, but cannot say that he lived through the holocaust, that father of whom I so recently spoke. For the man - and the tale is at least half his - was twisted, spiteful, full of self-pity and constantly falling into the past. His body may have lived, just barely, but his mind... It is the sad fact of life that there are too many such people in the world to read their life stories, to sift from their personality the parts that are good and pure from the weevils grind them down further each day. Therein lies the marvelous nature of Nightfather: It tells us that terrible, terribly truthful story from the viewpoint of our own selves. It is the story we would hear if our minds were as open as that of a child's; it is the story we would experience in our very bones if blocked nothing out, and felt... everything.