The Ghost Keeper

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