See Under: Love

Book excerpt: David Grossman's masterly fusing of vision, thought, and emotion make See Under: Love a luminously imaginative and profoundly affecting work. In this powerful novel by one of Israel's most prominent writers, Momik, the only child of Holocaust survivors, grows up in the shadow of his parents' history. Determined to exorcise the Nazi "beast" from their shattered lives and prepare for a second holocaust he knows is coming, Momik increasingly shields himself from all feeling and attachment. But through the stories his great-uncle tells him—the same stories he told the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp—Momik, too, becomes "infected with humanity." "A dazzling work of imagination."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times