Not Me: A Novel [Paperback]

Michael Lavigne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 13, 2007

Not Me is a remarkable debut novel that tells the dramatic and surprising stories of two men–father and son–through sixty years of uncertain memory, distorted history, and assumed identity.

When Heshel Rosenheim, apparently suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, hands his son, Michael, a box of moldy old journals, an amazing adventure begins–one that takes the reader from the concentration camps of Poland to an improbable love story during the battle for Palestine, from a cancer ward in New Jersey to a hopeless marriage in San Francisco. The journals, which seem to tell the story of Heshel’s life, are so harrowing, so riveting, so passionate, and so perplexing that Michael becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about his father.

As Michael struggles to come to grips with his father’s elusive past, a world of complex and disturbing possibilities opens up to him–a world in which an accomplice to genocide may have turned into a virtuous Jew and a young man cannot recall murdering the person he loves most; a world in which truth is fiction and fiction is truth and one man’s terrible–or triumphant–transformation calls history itself into question. Michael must then solve the biggest riddle of all: Who am I?

Intense, vivid, funny, and entirely original, Not Me is an unsparing and unforgettable examination of faith, history, identity, and love.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Buried beneath ill-advised metaphors (a revelatory journal "was glued to my fingers, like when you touch something really cold, like an ice cube or a metal pole...") and a clunky structure is a provocative debut novel that might have said something profound about growing up in the home of Holocaust survivors. Michael Rosenheim, a divorced stand-up comic, is caring for his Alzheimer's-afflicted father when he discovers 24 volumes of his father's journals. In them, Heshel Rosenheim has detailed (in the form of a novel) that he is not a concentration camp survivor, but a former Nazi accountant at Bergen-Belsen who has posed as a Jew since the end of WWII. The novel flips back and forth between Heshel's story and Michael's attempts to prove it real; Lavigne mixes in subplots about Michael's relationship with his son, his pining for his ex-wife, and his sister's slow, painful death from cancer. The diary sections hold the most sway, and the novel would have been better served had Lavigne kept the present-day story as little more than a frame surrounding the account of how one man transformed himself from SS officer to pillar of the New Jersey Jewish community. Lavigne's book has tremendous potential for drama, but it avoids telling the story at its heart.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Lavigne carves a new portal into the depthless mystery of the Holocaust, writing insightfully and imaginatively about the survival instinct and the thorny love between fathers and sons in a debut even more accomplished than Nicole Krauss' much-hailed Holocaust novel The History of Love (2005). Michael Rosenheim, a smart and endearingly self-deprecating stand-up comic, hides within a fortress of jokes in the wake of the early deaths of his sister and mother and his divorce. Now Heshel, his father, is in a Florida nursing home suffering from Alzheimer's. Holed up in his father's Judaica-festooned apartment, Michael feels as though he has gone through the looking glass as he starts reading a set of old journals. Lavigne alternates with increasing drama between the ruefully funny "live" scenes and the utter hell the blunt diarist describes in chronicling the life of Heinrich Mueller, an SS death camp accountant. As the Allies approach, he steals the identity of a dead Jewish inmate named Heshel Rosenheim and ends up in Israel, where Holocaust survivors fight heroically for a homeland. Performing a phenomenal balancing act between light and dark, past and present, guilt and forgiveness, Lavigne sets in motion profoundly complex moral dilemmas in a vivid, all-consuming, paradoxical, and quintessentially human story. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (February 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812973321
• ISBN-13: 978-0812973327
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.7 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #261,105 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Living & Forgiving, February 14, 2006

By 

Jane C. Wrenn "Jane-fnp" (athens) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Not Me: A Novel (Hardcover)

I have always been compelled to read about the Holocaust. There are so many stories, all important, all unforgettable, and most horrific. And I am completely amazed at the simplest lesson gleaned from these stories. . . life goes on. The human desire to live despite the atrocities of mankind constantly enlightens and inspires me. The human act of forgiveness in the face of these demeaning acts seems to be almost inhuman or perhaps otherworldly. And love; when our humanness is completely and utterly exposed to our world of those who love us most, there remains to ability to empathize, sympathize and forgive, and yes to go on. Les we forget. This book is a lovely story of love and forgiveness, fathers and sons, and guilt and redemption. I was immediately pulled into the story and I enjoyed my time among the pages and the sense of wonder that remained when the last page was read. Read the book and enjoy the ride.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Comic and the Nazi, April 29, 2007

By 

Morrow (Baltimore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Not Me: A Novel (Paperback)

This is a first novel. It suffers from cliche at times, and in the end gets terribly sentimental about being an American Jew in one's fifties without having understood what being Jewish means - having 'missed out' on the Holocaust and Zionism. But it reads fast. The first person narrator - a middle-aged son struggling to cope with his dying father - is a quirky, funny, sometimes maudlin soul trying to sort out his life. Separated from his wife and son in California, this middle-aged comic is alone in Florida and having a hard time. Failing at being a father himself, the narrator quickly learns that his ailing octogenarian Dad is not exactly who he says he is. But the ambiguity of Dad's identity is (too) quickly extinguished through the translation of the old man's German diaries. While not exactly a war criminal of high order, Dad, aka, SS officer Heinrich Muller, explains how he transformed himself from accountant to victim in a few short weeks before the Camps were overrun by Allied armies. Muller starves himself, adds the blue ink number tatoo to his arm, adopts the name of a corpse, and then gets swept up in the displaced persons program. Soon he is on his way to a kibbutz in Palestine. He ends up in the Palmach, fighting in Israel's war for independence. Romance and self-hatred take hold in equal measure. Perhaps he should simply run down to Gaza and tell the Egyptians who he really is and leave these Jews behind him?! These parts, set south of Jerusalem and along the northern end of the Negev (and his continuing dialogue regarding his self-hatred) are the best part of the book. In the end, however, the tension over Dad's identity doesn't bring resonance to the American son's personal issues so much as give us a look at the way in which people can get caught up in the crushing events of the 1940s, especially if they were European Jews, and German. The character of the 'Nazi' father is better imagined, I think, than that of the comic son, and the possiblity of "lying narrator" (the father's diaries and conversations with the son) might've been better exploited in order to leave the reader with greater puzzle and wonderment. It gets a bit sappy and repetitive - how many times will his mother's hat float across the pool as an expression of grief and deracination? The opportunity for a cross-generational discourse is sidelined for nebulous emotional effect. We do see, however, that one can make up a life; the fear of being tainted by our original sins can lead us to utterly transform the self. The searing experience of the camps and the death of a daughter reveals for the author an old testament God whose knowledge of our fundamental character is not forgiving.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Page turner, February 26, 2006

By 

Jody Grant-Gray "Author, 'The Sleep Book, A B... (Santa Monica, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Not Me: A Novel (Hardcover)

I got this book for my husband, because I thought he would like the historcial journals, as well as the father/son angle. However, I, myself, couldn't put the book down. The author has a unique voice that is easy to read, insightful, and thoughtful. The twist in the beginning provides momentum, and the historical details that follow are both informative and entertaining. I have already recommended this book to others. Well done.