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The Book of Aron, by Jim Shepard


About the Book (from the book's description on GR)

Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo.

When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape � as his mentor suspected he could � to spread word about the atrocities?

Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child's-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron's voice will remember it forever.


About the Author (from Wikipedia)

Jim Shepard (born 1956) is an American author and professor of creative writing and film at Williams College. Shepard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He received a B.A. at Trinity College in 1978 and an MFA from Brown University in 1980. He currently teaches creative writing and film at Williams College. His wife, Karen Shepard, is also a novelist. They are on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.

Several features characterize Shepard's writings, including a tendency to finish his stories with what Charles Baxter called an "in medias res ending", or an ending in the middle of the plot's events; a thematic focus on what Shepard calls the "costs of certain kinds of ethical passivity"; and a preference for events-driven plots that fight against what Shepard terms "the tyranny of the epiphany", referencing the more psychological, less active plots popularized by short story writers such as James Joyce. Additionally, Shepard writes from the point of view of characters of a wide variety of nationalities.

Shepard's stories often rely on substantial historical research based on real events. His collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, includes stories about the Greek playwright Aeschylus, the Chernobyl disaster and the 1964 Alaska earthquake. The collection acknowledges over sixty non-fiction works that helped to shape the historical detail in the stories. Similarly, Shepard's 2011 collection You Think That's Bad also cites an extensive bibliography, including Avalanches and Snow Safety, The Japanese Earthquake of 1923, Climate Changes and Dutch Water Management, and Satanism and Witchcraft. His 2015 novel The Book of Aron involved massive research into the Holocaust, which he called "critically important."


Other Links

� Author's website:

� Paris Review: When Are You Gonna Get Over This: An Interview with Jim Shepard (16 Oct 2012):

� Review -- The Guardian: "The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard review � a testament of love during the Holocaust. This novel about Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto and followed his charges to Treblinka, is a slim masterpiece" :

have you read this novel already? do you plan to do so before the TOB gets underway? we'd love to hear your thoughts!!

I feel terrible saying this, but I actually think this was pretty forgettable. I've read quite a lot of Holocaust fiction, and I didn't think this was a particularly stellar example of it.

Mainon wrote: "I feel terrible saying this, but I actually think this was pretty forgettable. I've read quite a lot of Holocaust fiction, and I didn't think this was a particularly stellar example of it."

I agree completely. It was told in the most sterile, unemotional way, I could never connect with it. I'm a huge fan of WWII fiction, so this was a big bummer for me.

Dianah wrote: "Mainon wrote: "I feel terrible saying this, but I actually think this was pretty forgettable. I've read quite a lot of Holocaust fiction, and I didn't think this was a particularly stellar example ..."

Thank goodness it's not just me! It was hard to admit (even to myself) that I read a book about orphans and ghettos and families struggling to survive and shocking deaths and unimaginable choices, yet somehow I remained largely unmoved...

I wonder if the prevalence of Holocaust literature has led to a desensitization of the topic. In other words, will a Holocaust novel only be memorable if it amplifies the violence and horror?
I just started this novel and it seems to have a quieter/subtler feel than many in the genre.

Ryan wrote: "I just started this novel and it seems to have a quieter/subtler feel than many in the genre. "

one big change in Holocaust literature that I'm still getting my arms around: these days authors are for the most part writing historical novels about the Holocaust, vs. autobiographical novels about the Holocaust.

Ryan wrote: "I wonder if the prevalence of Holocaust literature has led to a desensitization of the topic. In other words, will a Holocaust novel only be memorable if it amplifies the violence and horror?

Hard to say, but I don't think so. All the Light We Cannot See was both enormously popular and critically acclaimed, and I don't think it amplified the violence and horror at all--but it found a couple of new perspectives and wrote them beautifully.

And most importantly, it had characters that I really cared about.

I think your right- characters that can draw an empathetic response go a long way. I'm about halfway through this now and I kind of don't care what's happening to the characters. The style seems flat and emotionless.

The style did not bother me, but I didn't care for the book. I feel like any novel that is set in the middle of the Holocaust has a pretty high bar to clear to justify the setting, both because there are already so many Holocaust/WWII books and because the setting is an easy way to raise the stakes right out of the gate. And I just didn't see what drove the author to write this novel, or what he was trying to say other than how sad it was.

I read this book a while ago and remember being struck by the lack of emotion in the story. I felt it was due to a survival instinct, not to feel too much when caring would only cause pain. I was glad to read the story of Dr. Korczak.

I normally avoid novels set in the Holocaust because I just can't bear reading about it, and this book showed me I haven't changed much in that respect. But trying to look at it objectively, I thought the novel was very good once Aron became part of Korczak's orphanage, and bringing Korczak and his actions to light seems to me to be the impetus and "justification" for this novel. Korzcak was richly and complexly drawn I thought, particularly for such a relatively short amount of text.

But that was only about half the novel; the first half wasn't anything very remarkable. I would have preferred the novel be more centrally about Korzcak than Aron, and wonder why the author chose this approach if he wanted to write a novel about Korczak, which I assume he did since he made it end when the orphanage was emptied out to head to Treblinka, rather than have the story continue in the ghetto through the uprising that is briefly brought into view near the end.

So the steady accretion of details was effective, and the ending took my breath away, but I spent most of this book being bored and thinking about the idea that's come up in other discussions about people resenting books like A Little Life where it feels like the author is manipulating their emotions. It's like Shepard was manipulating the reader's emotions in the opposite way in this book, tamping down emotion and keeping things almost affectless. I felt emotionally manipulated and almost morally compromised to be reading a holocaust book that kept all the feelings at a remove, like how dare I be bored and impatient in the face of such horrors and heartbreak. So I'm glad to have read the stories of Aron and Dr. Korzcak, but puzzling a bit over my response to the book. I'm looking forward to the TOB discussion, and pondering, if manipulating emotions is, in some sense, what authors and other artists DO, when does it become a problem?

Jan wrote: "So the steady accretion of details was effective, and the ending took my breath away, but I spent most of this book being bored and thinking about the idea that's come up in other discussions about..."

Jan, you hit on an effective way to describe the feeling I had when reading this book, too -- almost a self-horror that I could be disengaged from the subject matter. If that was the author's intent, it's certainly an unusual one.

Mainon wrote: "Jan wrote: "So the steady accretion of details was effective, and the ending took my breath away, but I spent most of this book being bored and thinking about the idea that's come up in other discu..."

Yes!!! Thanks! I am really looking forward to seeing how this one fares.

You guys are doing a pretty good job convincing me I should give it another shot. Perhaps I put it down too soon but I definitely found the near flippant handling of the era and Aron's childhood distasteful.

I'm another who agrees with Jan's comments!

Amy wrote: "You guys are doing a pretty good job convincing me I should give it another shot. Perhaps I put it down too soon but I definitely found the near flippant handling of the era and Aron's childhood di..."

Haha, what are friends for?

I didn't see Shepard as being flippant, but his use of such a young, traumatized boy as the narrator definitely makes for some strange storytelling.

It seems I had a different emotional reaction to the book than most commenters. The lack of emotion in the book added to the impact for me. I understand how a child would have no context for what was happening, and certainly no idea about how bad it would ultimately become. So following a child in day to day life, with incremental atrocities gathering moment by moment, ending with getting on the train - it floored me. To Aron, it was normal, he adapted and made do. He knew no other reality. The heartbreak came from being an omniscient reader who has historical perspective and knows how the story ends.

Trish wrote: "It seems I had a different emotional reaction to the book than most commenters. The lack of emotion in the book added to the impact for me. I understand how a child would have no context for what w..."

That is a super great point, Trish. I didn't get that when I was reading it, but I can see how that could have happened. Thanks for shedding some more light on this book for me.

Trish wrote: "It seems I had a different emotional reaction to the book than most commenters. The lack of emotion in the book added to the impact for me. I understand how a child would have no context for what w..."

Trish, I admire your reaction and have been wondering why more of us (myself included) weren't able to have it until the very end of the book. I've been contrasting Book of Aron to Room, in which Donoghue dealt with an even more naïve/limited child but kept me on the edge of my seat because she allowed us into Ma's thinking. I question Shepard's choices to keep the book so uniformly flat and allow the accretion of detail to do all the work. I think my lack of response (until the end) is leading me to feel ashamed as a reader, and I'm struggling to rationalize my experience.