The Ghost Keeper
Ratings1
Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
Winner of the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, this powerful, sweeping novel set in Vienna during the 1930s and ’40s centres on a poignant love story and a friendship that ends in betrayal. In the years between the two world wars, Josef Tobak builds a quiet life around his friendships, his beloved wife, Anna, and his devotion to the old Jewish cemeteries of Vienna. Then comes the Anschluss in 1938, and Josef’s world is uprooted. His health disintegrates. His wife and child are forced to flee to China. His closest gentile friend joins the Nazi Party—and yet helps Josef escape to America. When the war ends, Josef returns to Vienna with his family and tries to make sense of what remains, including his former Nazi friend who, he discovers, protected Josef’s young female cousin throughout the war. Back among his cemeteries in Austria’s war-shattered capital, Josef finds himself beset by secrets, darkness and outward righteousness marred by private cruelty. As the truth is unearthed, Josef’s care for the dead takes on new meaning while he confronts his own role in healing both his devastated community and his deepest wounds. The Ghost Keeper is a story about the terrible choices we make to survive and the powerful connections to communities and friends that define us. Here is a finely accomplished novel that introduces an exciting new voice to our literary landscape.
Reviews with the most likes.
A bit of a slow start, because the narrator Josef started out by being wishy-washy about how to start the story, and where in time to start since this book is not perfectly linear, and also one of the things that drove me bananas about this book was that the story frequently switches from first to third person, even though the only POV character is Josef.
And yet Josef redeems himself by being a beautifully quiet storyteller, and once I got past the halfway mark, I flew through this.
The description of this book covers most of the plot points - due to an illness when they are due to leave Austria due to the encroach of WWII, Josef and his wife and child are not able to stay together, escaping to opposite sides of the world (America for him, China for them), thanks to the help of his gentile friend Friedrich, who joins the Nazi party to keep up appearances while also secretly hiding Josef's distant cousin in his attic crawlspace.
And the content warnings below lay out the rest of the story, but none of it was a surprise to me.
I appreciated how one of the things he did in his spare time was care for two Jewish cemeteries, bearing witness to people he never knew and doing his best to hold their memories.
For a Holocaust book, it was quite different than anything I'd read before, and it was good.
CW: the Holocaust (antisemitism, death [mostly off-page], Nazis), statutory rape, stillbirth, suicide
