Three Reasons to Read Federman : A Review of Shhh: The Story of a Childhood by J. A. Tyler

Raymond Federman died in 2009. This is not the reason to read Federman. Rest in peace as they say, but Federman would not want it like that, to gain readers simply by his own mortality.

Raymond Federman didn’t die in 1942. This is also not the reason to read Federman — plenty of people should have or nearly did or almost could have died at earlier points in their lives. Federman would not want readers merely because of this fateful lengthening of his life either.

Then why read Federman’s very last book Shhh: The Story of a Childhood a novel (Starcherone Books, 2010)?

Three reasons:

[ 1 ]

The story of Federman is a tremendous and startling story. Barely a teen, Federman’s mother pushed him into a closet when the French Gestapo arrived to take his Jewish family to their end in Auschwitz. He stayed in that closet through what remained of the day and the entire night, only to emerge the next morning without a family, all of whom he would never see again. It is a magnificently rendered story of heart-wrenching quality, a boy in search of somewhere to stand as the world sinks away around his feet. As much memoir as it is novel, Federman-as-a-boy finds extended family members and walks them to the train as well but is not boarded with them, his name not on the list of Jews to collect. Indeed Federman is saved, alone but spared, and Shhh is the brilliant recounting of this unbelievable childhood. If for nothing else, the plot of Federman’s rebirth in 1942 is worth taking Shhh into a quiet room and letting it wash out. But there is more, there is so much more.

[ 2 ]

It would be nothing short of horrendous to force those memories out of a system, a life that has no doubt worked to cover and recover the staggering fact of a life lived as Federman lived it. But Federman is not satisfied with a mere retelling of this story, he must also deconstruct it as he goes, giving the book both its narration from Federman himself, as well as from an alter ego, the counter-narrator who speaks against Federman, who questions Federman’s facts and methods, who asks Federman to move ahead or share more details, who keeps Federman in check throughout the novel. And in part, this is what makes Shhh as much novel as memoir, this destructive and deconstructive anti-narration, the voice that allows this book to be so much more than a simple telling of a caustic and tragic event in European history and in Federman’s life. And yet, Federman is not satisfied with just that either, with just breaking the text as he writes. There is more. With Federman, there is always more.

[ 3 ]

The third and final reason proposed here as a justification to pick-up, to buy, to order Shhh for every library in every zip code in this nation, is the levity with which Federman eases into and out of the dark dark hole that is both the holocaust that Federman missed and the closet that made him miss it. Federman and anti-Federman both rail and rally against one another to the point of flippancy, downplaying the gravity of the situation, of Federman’s boyhood at the most pivotal and important moments. We are as readers then flung in and out of a death missed and in and out of a life lived, the Federman that could have been and the Federman that was. Federman keeps the story afloat, buoyant, by the clever manner in which he both lightens and darkens each and every turn of the pages. And perhaps it is this beyond all other things that makes us miss Federman already, not nearly a year yet since his death.

Raymond Federman died in 2009.

Raymond Federman could have died in 1942.

And Raymond Federman could have written a memoir, or a holocaust novel.

Instead, he wrote both.

There are no quotes from the text in this review. There are no quips or phrases or words from Federman himself here, in this, as you are reading. Shhh is owed more than my quoting of it. Shhh deserves to be read. Shhh warrants an opening of the book as a book, not as easy scraps to be quickly picked up and put down. For these three reasons, for a million others, for six million others, for Federman, for yourself, for the words that are and aren’t in this brilliant lovely horrible moving crushing resounding book, read Shhh.