PROFESSOR SCHIFF'S GUILT, humor is hard, but better when hard-edged

PROFESSOR SCHIFF'S GUILT
AGUR SCHIFF (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen.

An Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house.

Entertaining and thought-provoking, this satire of contemporary attitudes toward racism and the legacy of colonialism examines economic inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor’s passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose and the book he's secretly writing about his experience there nothing but a modern version of the slave trade?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm willing to bet that most people squirm just reading the synopsis. It's a reckoning with the long shadow of chattel slavery and its ties to Jewish merchants.

I think the best choice Author Schiff made was to tell the story in a comedic register, relying on farcical coincidences of crime and punishment to acknowledge past harms while lampooning present ones caused by some clumsy, bureaucratic attempt at balancing cosmic scales.

The far more interesting point Author Schiff makes, to me at least, is the sheer ubiquity of the mental construct of Africa as lesser, as broken and needing "us" to fix it. The way Professor Schiff approaches his putative project in the narrative begs the question "why are you doing this?"

As a meditation on white guilt versus White Guilt, I think it's a great contribution to necessary conversations about Jewish complicity in the crimes of chattel slavery. As a novel about an individual man's coming to self-awareness, it felt...off.

The parallels drawn between Ancestor Schiff and his appropriation of the slavegirl, and Storyteller Schiff and his relationship to his cleaner, weren't that successful in my reading eyes. They felt as performative as the arrest and legal proceedings of Storyteller Schiff did, without the sharp edge of satire to make them cut my tough hide of willful ignorance. As a result, I was more squicked out than I was challenged to contemplate the real meaning of these sexual crimes. In fact I felt less sympathy for Ancestor Schiff before Storyteller Schiff's peccadillo was brought in. I think the opposite was intended.

I know that could really be a "me" thing, but I bring it up to alert readers who find sexual exploitation deeply unpleasant that this could decrease their reading pleasure.

I'm not as delighted by the read as others were but I am happy to have read a reckoning with an underrepresented crime of historical complicity.