All books, plays, and movies about the Holocaust are sad; they are, however, not all interesting. Fred Wander's The Seventh Well (translated by Michael Hofmann) is sad and, except in a few sections, tedious.
Wander, a camp survivor, approached his material logically, at least IMHO…"'Six million murdered Jews!' he writes …. 'It's not possible to say anything about so many millions of dead. But three or four individuals, it might be possible to write a story about!'" (page 151) Sadly, for me, the approach didn't work. Were there only three or four individuals? It felt like more, and I never had a clear idea of who was who as Wander jumped back and forth among them. I had much the same reaction years ago to Schlindler's List. Horrible things were happening to those characters, but there were so many and in their tattered black-and-white clothing, they looked so much alike that I had trouble identifying with any one character. So much for emotional involvement.
As a comparison, I believe TV's Roots worked in pointing out the horrors of slavery because it was about specific individuals in each decade it covered. I wish someone would write a Roots about the Holocaust. Maybe I should go back and watch again the TV miniseries called, I'm pretty sure, The Holocaust. I don't remember it as great TV (Is that an oxymoron?), but I do remember at least caring about some of the characters.
