Bleaker Than Bleak House

The Immense Loneliness of Jim Shepard's Holocaust Novel The Book of Aronby Rich SmithBefore we can even get into the story of The Book of Aron, the bleaker-than-Bleak-House narrative of boys smuggling turnips and information through the heavily guarded walls of the Jewish ghetto, the decline of an orphanage therein, and the looming specter of Treblinka—before we can dig into the language, it seems important to ask this question: Why did a non-Jew living in the 21st century write a book abo