Gotz & Meyer - Softcover

David Albahari

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099461730 ISBN 13: 9780099461739

Publisher: Harcourt, 2005

Synopsis

Believing they were being taken to a better camp, Belgrade's Jews would climb into the truck with a sense of relief. Mainly women, children and the elderly, they expected a long and uncomfortable trip but, after crossing the border, their journey would come to an abrupt end. Here the drivers would get out and attach a hose from the exhaust to the back of the truck. Over the course of a few months in 1942 the Nazis systematically exterminated the majority of Serbia's Jews using carbon monoxide and specially designed trucks. The only information the narrator of this bleakly comic novel can find about the summer when his relatives disappeared is the names of the truck drivers - Götz and Meyer. During his research he becomes fascinated by the unknowable characters and daily lives of these men. But his imagination proves a dangerous force, and his obsession with the past threatens to overwhelm him.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"A gorgeous work of the imagination about an act of imagination. The tone is pure, as strange as can be, and hypnotizing."—Deborah Eisenberg, Bomb magazine

The nameless narrator of Götz and Meyer, a Jewish schoolteacher, discovers Wilhelm Götz and Erwin Meyer, two noncommissioned SS officers, while researching his family tree. Overwhelmed by the horror of his discoveries as they become entangled with his own feverish imaginings, he organizes a class trip during which the teacher and his students connect with Belgrade’s lost souls in a sacred act of remembering.
"From two names, Albahari conjures imaginary souls whose lives represent all those whom history has forgotten."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Ranks with the best of Holocaust literature."—Chicago Tribune

"Has a resonance beyond its own times."—Richard Eder, The Boston Globe

DAVID ALBAHARI is the prize-winning author of several collections of short stories and novels. He was for many years the editor-in-chief of Pismo, a magazine of world literature, and lived in Belgrade. He now lives in Calgary, Canada.

From the Inside Flap:

Götz and Meyer, two noncommissioned SS officers, are entrusted with an assignment, "not a big one," but one that "requires efficiency." Their task is to transport five thousand women, children and elderly, one hundred at a time, from a concentration camp near Belgrade in a hermetically sealed truck, in which they are gassed. As Albahari's anonymous narrator, a teacher, obsessively pursues the truth of this systematic annihilation, he shares his findings with his students. Their school bus becomes that truck, and as the memory of Belgrade's lost Jewish souls is evoked, the students are bewildered. Their teacher, worn down as much by the task of making history come alive as by the toll his research has taken on him, is overwhelmed by the horror of his own imaginings.

A harrowing, masterfully written story, full of compassion, irony, and lyricism.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0099461730
• ISBN 13: 9780099461739
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144