The Memory Monster

Yishai Sarid

Jun 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Keith Sellon-Wright

2.5

2 reviews

Audiobook

4 hr 25 min

Unabridged

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About this audiobook

Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims' lives. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers-their efficiency, audacity, and determination. With the perspicuity of Kafka's The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo's White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it?

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2.5

2 reviews

About the author

Yishai Sarid was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1965. Sarid was recruited to Israeli Army in 1983 and served for five years. Nowadays he is an active lawyer and arbitrator, practicing mainly civil and administrative law. Alongside his legal career, Sarid writes literature, and so far he has published five novels.

Keith Sellon-Wright is a seasoned professional with a career in Hollywood spanning over thirty years. He has worked with some of Hollywood's seminal directors, including Christopher Guest and Spike Lee. His television credits include Wings, Frasier, Seinfeld, The West Wing, NCIS, Mad Men, and Parks and Recreation.

Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and Hebrew translator. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is a regular blogger for Ploughshares. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Literary Hub, Blunderbuss, Apogee, The Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, and Words Without Borders, among other publications.

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