A Man Lies Dreaming

At first blush, A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar is not the type of book one turns to for comfort and inspiration in times of need. I describe it as “pulpy but with Holocaust features.” Not exactly the stuff of Hallmark movies. Going in, I prepared for a rough ride. Having read some of Tidhar’s short fiction before, and struggled with it, I was expecting shock value, an exploration of the erotization of travesty, and to be slightly disgusted by every single character. What I failed to anticipate was that this book would force me to rethink everything I knew to be fundamental about humanity.

The story is told in two alternating timelines. The first, where we spend the bulk of our time, involves an alternate history in which the Nazis never fully rose to power and Hitler is a refugee turned detective in an increasingly xenophobic London. He is hired to find a missing Jewish girl, encounters the usual gumshoe obstacles including a lot of grotesque violence directed towards him, and along the way is framed for the murder of numerous prostitutes.

In the second timeline we follow Shomer, a writer of the Jewish pulp novels known as shund, who is currently an inmate of Auschwitz. While this story line is certainly gory, the voice is fundamentally different from the pulp of the other timeline. It is the voice of a truth so abhorrent it can never be equaled by fiction. It is also the story of how people survived and processed this reality.

There is a featured debate between two Auschwitz prisoners about how to record these events. Most readers familiar with Holocaust literature will recognize them as stand ins for Eli Wiesel and Ka-Tzetnik 135633, survivors who later documented the Holocaust in their own unique ways. Shomer finds a different solution to this problem – inventing his own world to help his mind escape the physical horrors his body is enduring. It is a world with the distinctivelly pulp voice of shund, in which Hitler is a washed up detective.

The connection between the timelines is wonderfully spun, but it is not what I found so captivating about this book. I was indeed grossed out by many portions of the Hitler narrative. It is violent, full of ugly sex and unspeakable acts of humiliation and torture. My stomach turned numerous times and only later did I recall that the victim is in fact Hitler. This ability to force the reader into radical empathy for the worst possible human ever to exist, was the true brilliance of the work for me. We are made to watch our own revenge porn through the eyes of the original aggressor. And we do not like the picture that results.

I know what you’re thinking. So what if Hitler had a bad day? Cry me a river. But hear me out.

I admit, it is extremely repugnant to spend any time in that man’s head, hearing his vitriol towards Jews while he shows zero self awareness despite similar hate directed towards him by radical political parties rising to power around him. You will be made to feel guilty for finding it relatable and funny when he goes after the publisher that is quashing his artistic ambitions. However, this is necessary to bring the reader to a conclusion about the purpose of empathy and kindness. They are not for the benefit of the recipient, but rather for the rest of us, lest we lose our own humanity. Our feelings of revulsion at the violence committed against another human are there to remind us that these things should not be done. Even if that victim is the worst possible human ever to exist.

We live in an age where thanks to social media political ideals are rapidly turned into diatribes against individual humans. For example,the laudable idea of wealth equality somehow becomes lovingly detailed social media posts about the abduction, torture and cannibalism of named billionaires and their families. We, the global ‘we’ including Jews and gentiles alike, dehumanize people under the banner of various ideologies. We make life cheap in service of our lofty goals and revenge fantasies. In doing so, we lose our own humanity.

I found myself identifying with Shomer. There’s a reason I favor Jewish space ship stories – they allow me to envision a planet on which there is no antisemitism. A future in which being a Jew does not have to mean being immediately demonized and misunderstood. Likewise, Shomer has created an entire fictional world in which he can meet out justice to his oppressors and escape his ghastly present. As a master of shund, the world he creates is visceral and captivating, the perfect escapism. Yet, as a writer, this book showed me I could also aim for more.

For all my appreciation of Shomer, it is Tidhar’s writing that I want to emulate right now. I want to force the reader to walk in the shoes of even those they find most vile and still dredge up some empathy from their hearts. That is not just the work of a master author, but a master human, who realizes that we need those feelings to find within ourselves the means to move on. That only through living the other can we, all of us, as a human nation stop committing horrific violence against one another and justifying it the same way Hitler did – with political ideology and radicalization of both the left and the right.

It is a dream of mine that someday perhaps a person who views Jews as the root of all evil might pick up one of my works and realize that we are just people the same as they are. Maybe through reading we can learn to think of one another as complex, living, breathing, beings that are more precious than whatever the trendy ideology of the day is. Perhaps we can learn to value human life above all else, including our old wounds and hurts.

A Man Lies Dreaming is not pretty, but to me it was profoundly moving. It celebrates the power of the mind to triumph over the physical and took me on a journey that probed my deepest and most shameful places so that I could emerge with a new understanding of what it means to be a Jew and a human in this world at this time. For me, that encapsulates the ability to experience despair while still finding hope, to survive the unthinkable, and to move on with my humanity intact.

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