It Can't Happen Here (Again)

Do you think the U.S. is embracing fascism?

No. That’s Philip Roth’s book The Plot Against America, where Lindbergh was a metaphor, I think, for President Bush. I like Roth a lot and I am critical of the U.S. as well, but that’s much too overstated.

You’re a Jewish writer from Prague. Any affinity with Kafka?

Yes. Not because of our similar backgrounds, but I think he is one of the most phenomenal authors of the modern era and very enigmatic. Ever since I was a student, I’ve read him and read about him, and I always planned that when I have more time and I can do things that I want and not the things I feel I have to, that I would write an essay about Kafka. And now I will have the time to do it.

So you’re done writing about the Holocaust?

Yes, because it wouldn’t make sense after these two volumes. I will still read whatever I can get my hands on, but now I will work on this. I’m 75, and I have other things I want to do.

Where would you like to see people pick up the ball with Holocaust research?

There is much to be done, particularly in the microhistory. I have a colleague, an ex-student, Omer BarTov, a professor at Brown, who is writing about a small village in Galicia [in present-day Ukraine], Buczacz, where you had Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and then came the Germans. So he studies the relations between these people before, during and after the war. The Jews then were gone, of course, so he looks at the memory of the Jews among the others. There is this whole concreteness which still needs to be studied — why did the neighbors with whom they lived together for centuries suddenly kill them?