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I'll Sell You a Million Jews
"Don't you dare call me a Jew," shouts Lionel Miller to a group of Arrow Crosses, native Fascists, searching a train in Budapest, Spring 1944. In fact, he is a leader of the Jewish Underground. One of the Arrow shouts, "Look, the Zhid's wearing a cross." Suddenly, inspired, Lionel tears at his pants and cries, "Look, you bastards, look." The ruse works as the Arrow Crosses turn away to seek other Jewish prey on the train.
Lionel undergoes torture, escapes death in his struggles with the Arrow Crosses and finally accepts a bizarre assignment proposed by Adolf Eichman who offers the proposition that is the title of the book, I'll Sell You A Million Jews. Lionel goes to Istanbul and the story culminates in a series of frustrations as he struggles to carry out the mission of rescuing the Hungarian Jews.
He discovers that nobody - or hardly anybody - will do anything about saving the Jews. In the process he learns about the bankruptcy of morality in his world. He is kidnapped by the British to defeat his mission and this, as well as other events in Istanbul and Palestine, impact on his Jewishness and stir up in him an identity crisis. At moments close to suicide, he asks Job-like questions of God and comes to understand that the Jews, in part perhaps because of their "chosenness," are a metaphor for all mankind and the Holocaust becomes a litmus test for man's moral destination.
Lionel undergoes torture, escapes death in his struggles with the Arrow Crosses and finally accepts a bizarre assignment proposed by Adolf Eichman who offers the proposition that is the title of the book, I'll Sell You A Million Jews. Lionel goes to Istanbul and the story culminates in a series of frustrations as he struggles to carry out the mission of rescuing the Hungarian Jews.
He discovers that nobody - or hardly anybody - will do anything about saving the Jews. In the process he learns about the bankruptcy of morality in his world. He is kidnapped by the British to defeat his mission and this, as well as other events in Istanbul and Palestine, impact on his Jewishness and stir up in him an identity crisis. At moments close to suicide, he asks Job-like questions of God and comes to understand that the Jews, in part perhaps because of their "chosenness," are a metaphor for all mankind and the Holocaust becomes a litmus test for man's moral destination.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1995
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