The Inventory [Hardcover]

Gila Lustiger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 2001

Beginning with a love story and ending with a ledger of its character's fates, The Inventory examines the ways in which the lives of ordinary citizens intersect in a society where persecution and extermination become daily events. We see Volker Tilling, a high-school student tortured by the Gestapo because of his vague association with the Young Socialist Workers brigade; Werner Kurig, a renowned opera singer who is beaten for suspicion of homosexuality; and little Anna Rossner, whose mental disability sends her-trustingly-to the camps. Written with a surprising, analytic tone, ringed with irony and sarcasm, The Inventory bears the authenticity of reportage in its terrifying register of the Holocaust.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A series of loosely interlocking narrative snapshots tells the story of a small community of characters in Germany before, during and after WWII, where hero and villain alike fear and doubt what they do, and decisions made long before the war suddenly take on new significance. Ignoring his family's wishes, a Jewish man abandons his dentistry studies and opens a bookshop. When it is Aryanized and he is taken away to a camp, dentistry saves his life but crushes his soulDhe spends the war extracting the gold teeth of gassed prisoners. A German Christian who marries a wealthy Jewess for her money eventually converts to Judaism for her love, only to find his act of faith has placed his family in jeopardy. The fates of Polish nationalists, German homosexuals, criminals and the disabled are portrayed alongside those of Jews and Nazis. Wisely avoiding melodrama through the sheer cumulative weight of information, the novel is composed in studiously dispassionate prose, the characters little more than sketches. Part of a second generation of Holocaust writers, Lustiger is the daughter of a camp survivor who told her as a child that the numbers tattooed on his arm were his telephone number. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This inventive and effective first novel is in the form of a cycle of vignettes about a wide range of characters that populate pre-World War II and wartime Germany. As the title indicates, the author takes stock of the conditions under which the denizens of Nazi Germany (more specifically, the victims and victimizers that made up German society at that time) lived in those "uncertain times," as one character says in a remarkable understatement. The fact is that Germany in the 1930s and 1940s was a country descending further and further into the maelstrom. Lustiger introduces the reader to an array of men, women, and children, from various walks of life, using their stories to explore the economic, religious, racial, and political tensions in German life that were straining to the breaking point. From a famous opera singer beaten up by the SA and subsequently compelled to emigrate, to a German officer witnessing a mass execution of Jewish prisoners, the populace's experiences speak from different angles to the immoral social fabric of Nazi Germany. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 294 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (January 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559705493
• ISBN-13: 978-1559705493
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,235,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary and unforgettable novel, January 24, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Inventory (Hardcover)

It's one am, and I should be sleeping, but I just finished The Inventory and am unwilling to let it go. This novel was one of the most powerful I've ever read... In precise, even stark, language, Lustiger captures and personalizes the tragedy of genocide. Yet The Inventory is not about the experiences of one person, or one family, or one town: rather, it strives to portray the immensity of all that was lost in the Holocaust. Reading this novel hurts; it brings you into a world that you don't want to be a part of, that you don't want to imagine or understand. Yet, for that reason, I believe that it's an incredibly important book.

If you find The Inventory as compelling as I did, you may also want to read Micheline Marcom's Three Apples Fell From Heaven, an equally powerful examination of the Armenian genocide.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars evocative, unsettling, but choppy exploration of Holocaust, July 15, 2002

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Inventory (Hardcover)

One of the challenges facing novelists who use the Holocaust as a central theme of their fiction is finding focus and thematic coherence. As the deliberate, horrific destruction of European Jewry during World War II fades in historical immediacy, that catastrophic event tends to be blended with other human-made disasters of the past. This dilution of the Holocaust's profound destruction results in a faceless quality to genocide; it becomes just another mass murder of the blood-drenched twentieth century. Gila Lustiger deserves praise for her determined attempt to put a human face on inhuman mass murder in her engaging, evocative but frustrating "The Inventory." At its best, Lustiger's novel is a brilliant kaleidescopic work of art; it is multifaceted, psychologically challenging and desperately perceptive. At its weakest, "The Inventory" reads like a shattered mosaic; one senses the art behind the writing but is unable to discern direction and meaning.

"The Inventory" is neither a character study or a narrative-driven novel. Instead, the very core of this work is the Holocaust itself; the event itself looms as the thematic thread which ties together over thirty otherwise disjointed short stories. Victims, perpetrators and bystanders have names, faces and their own histories, but no one character dominates. Instead, Lustiger assembles an extraordinary cast, from working-class Germans to wealthy Jews, whose sole purpose is to illuminate how and why this genocidal murder could take place. The author's answers unearth no new discoveries, but her conclusions are at once irrefutable and distressing. Mass murder occurred because most Germans either hoped it would or did not care if it would come to pass. Nazi dictatorship, as brutal and comprehensive as a police state could become, accomodated (and did not create) Jew hatred in Germany. Betrayal, denunciations and removal afforded economic opportunities; moral behaviors, including compassion and defiance, atrophied. That Lustiger could accomplish her examination of the Holocaust through a collection of broadly interrelated short stories is a considerable literary achievement.

Yet, other writers have tackled this approach to the Holocaust with better results. For instance, Marcie Hershman's "Tales of the Master Race" reads with more coherence and equal power. Nevertheless, Gila Lustiger's novel has moments of absolute brilliance. Her account of a German divorce proceeding, which resulted from "the purchase of a silver-plated powder compact from a Jewish store as a marital offense," demonstrates the degree to which Jew-hatred had saturated German society in the late 1930s. The evocative story of Ernst Fuchs humanizes the despair, degradation and self-doubt victims encountered during the decade of deliberate anti-Jewish laws and actions. Her concluding short stories clearly are written in the crucible of anguish and sorrow.

Despite its disjointed, fractured format, "The Inventory" is a successful novel. Gila Lustiger set out to place faces on those who betrayed, removed and murdered Europe's Jews. Her novel does much more than that. With graceful, even poetic language, "The Inventory" invites the reader to grapple with his or her own questions and dares the reader to challenge the notion that this genocide was perpetrated by bureaucratic indifference and cold-blooded, inhuman murderers.