The Book of Aron: A novel

by Jim Shepard Narrated by Michael Goldstrom

Overview

The acclaimed National Book Award finalist-“one of the United States' finest writers,” according to Joshua Ferris, “full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity”-now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust.

Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo.

When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children's rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape-as his mentor suspected he could-to spread word about the atrocities?*
Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child's-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron's voice will remember it forever.

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2015 - AudioFile

This remarkable audiobook unfolds movingly as delivered in a calm, measured voice by narrator Michael Goldstrom. Set in WWII-era Poland, the novel reveals the horrors of war through the eyes of the title character, Aron, whom Goldstrom voices perfectly. His performance has a quiet quality that suits the subject matter—after all, nothing could FULLY re-create these powerful scenes in the listener’s mind. Through his measured, reserved tone, Goldstrom allows us to fill in the blanks, and the effect is ideal. As listeners’ imaginations take over, they become part of Aron’s band of child smugglers and petty thieves who struggle to keep their families alive in the Warsaw ghettos. L.B.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

02/02/2015
Shepard (You Think That’s Bad) is known for his enormous range and for the research that informs his many novels and stories—a reputation that will be reconfirmed with this novel, the acknowledgments section of which runs six pages long. And yet it is a supple, unlabored voice that issues from Aron (Sh’maya to his family), a young Polish Jew who survives as a thief, urchin, and smuggler forcibly relocated to Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto following the German invasion. Typhus, blackmail, and the Nazis’ wanton violence are routine, but perhaps the greatest threat is the Jewish Order Service, in charge of requisitions and expulsions, for whom Aron agrees to become an informer. Meanwhile, his gang—lead by the charismatic and more politically committed youth Boris—fight for control of the Quarter’s meager resources. But Aron’s alliances begin to shift following the rise of disappearances and quarantines, especially after he meets Janusz Korczak, “The Old Doctor,” a famous radio personality turned guardian who runs a shelter for children even as news of the concentration camps begins to trickle down. Aron’s fate will come down to a question of conviction: will Aron commit himself to Boris’s cause, or embrace the doctor’s selfless idealism? Shepard is a master with a light touch—but against the backdrop of the Holocaust, maybe a bit too light. Although this novel paints an unflinching portrait of the ghetto, many characters seem to stand in for ideas, and the limp plot is propped up only by Shepard’s eye for detail. 50,000-copy first printing. (May)

From the Publisher

The story of what happened to children in the Holocaust is not for the faint-hearted. A fictional, first-person narrative from the point of view of a Jewish child in Warsaw—in fact, a child in Dr. Janusz Korczak’s well-known orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto—is very brave. And a heartbreaking historical novel that ends in Treblinka may not be what many readers are expecting from a novelist and short-story writer whose ironic touch is often comedic. But Jim Shepard has written a Holocaust novel that stands with the most powerful writing on that terrible subject.” —John Irving

“Heartbreaking but never sentimental, comic but never unserious, terrifying but always engrossing, The Book of Aron brings us face to face with the unimaginable, actual truth.” —Daniel Handler

“Heart-breaking, shattering, charming and brilliant—there isn’t one word that isn’t the young boy’s. Jim Shepard has written some of the best books I’ve read and The Book of Aron is his best.” —Roddy Doyle

“This moving novel bears witness to human complexity with an uncompromising compassion.  It is a testament not only to Janusz Korczak and the children in the Warsaw Ghetto but to every child abandoned in war.  History must open our hearts to the present and this is Jim Shepard's powerful achievement.” —Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces

“Understated and devastating. . . . an exhaustively researched, pitch-perfect novel exploring the moral ambiguities of survival [in which] ordinary people reveal dimensions that are extraordinarily cruel or kind.”  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Library Journal

★ 12/01/2014
The Warsaw Ghetto during the darkest days of World War II is the setting of this important, heartbreaking but also inspiring new novel from National Book Award nominee Shepard (Like You'd Understand, Anyway). Told from the perspective of Aron, a Jewish boy in the ghetto, it is the study of the sadistic and systematic deprivation and dehumanization of a people. Forced with his family from the countryside into the ghetto, where he joins a band of hardy young smugglers, Aron eventually loses his entire clan to typhus, malnutrition, and forced labor and ends up in an orphanage in the ghetto run by Janusz Korczak, an important historical figure from this period. Korczak was a well-known advocate for children's rights before the war and became famous for the orphanage he ran in the ghetto, and the author brings this heroic figure powerfully to life. Shepard also skillfully depicts the blighted human and moral landscape within the ghetto, where normal understandings of right and wrong have become impossibly compromised under the pressure of extermination. Surrounded by devastation, hopelessness, and cruelty, Korczak becomes an exemplar of all that is good and decent in the human spirit. Few will be able to read the last terrible, inspiring pages without tears in their eyes. VERDICT Indispensable reading. [See Prepub 11/3/14.]—Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

JUNE 2015 - AudioFile

This remarkable audiobook unfolds movingly as delivered in a calm, measured voice by narrator Michael Goldstrom. Set in WWII-era Poland, the novel reveals the horrors of war through the eyes of the title character, Aron, whom Goldstrom voices perfectly. His performance has a quiet quality that suits the subject matter—after all, nothing could FULLY re-create these powerful scenes in the listener’s mind. Through his measured, reserved tone, Goldstrom allows us to fill in the blanks, and the effect is ideal. As listeners’ imaginations take over, they become part of Aron’s band of child smugglers and petty thieves who struggle to keep their families alive in the Warsaw ghettos. L.B.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2015-02-17
An understated and devastating novel of the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation, as seen through the eyes of a street-wise boy.Shepard has recently earned more renown for his short stories (You Think That's Bad, 2011, etc.), but here he presents an exhaustively researched, pitch-perfect novel exploring the moral ambiguities of survival through a narrator who's just 9 years old when the tale begins. He's a Jewish boy living in the Polish countryside with his family and an odd sense of his place in the world. "It was terrible to have to be the person I was," he despairs, matter-of-factly describing himself as basically friendless, a poor student, and an enigma to his loving mother: "She said that too often my tongue worked but not my head, or my head worked but not my heart." Yet Aron proves to be engaging company as he describes the selfishness that will help him survive as the world becomes increasingly hellish. The horrors are so incremental that Aron—and the reader—might be compared to the lobster dropped into the pot as the temperature keeps rising past the boiling point. Aron's perspective is necessarily limited, and he often seems to have little understanding of what's happening around him or why. His family is pushed into the city, and in the ghetto's chaos, he's separated from them. Serving as a moral counterweight to the boy's instinctive pragmatism is Dr. James Korczak, a real-life Polish Jew whose ambition to "become the Karl Marx of children" inspired him to keep a couple hundred alive through his orphanage, which he supports by begging for funds from the better-off ghetto inhabitants. Aron becomes the doctor's ward and accomplice, though he has also been serving as an occasional informer for the Gestapo through an intermediary in the Jewish police. He tries to use his position to help save the doctor from being sent to a concentration camp, but the doctor is only interested if he can save all the other children as well. "How do we know if we love enough?" asks the doctor. "How do we learn to love more?" Ordinary people reveal dimensions that are extraordinarily cruel or kind.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171965181
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/12/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

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