Analysis Of Time's Arrow

Richard Amis probably believes that Time’s Arrow is a powerful book with a noble cause, bringing attention to the Holocaust by telling a story from the perspective of a Nazi doctor using an innovative reverse-chronological structure. Although Amis conjures powerful and distinctly unsettling imagery that questions cultural ethics and morality using violence as a form of healing, for example sex workers are beaten “into shape with [their pimp’s] jeweled fists” (Amis 31), this novel is anything but noble. A gentile, born years after the Holocaust ended, that plays at being able to cast new light on an atrocity that they will never fully comprehend is an attention-seeking and disrespectful fool, regardless of their skill and prowess as an author.

I was privileged to know some of my maternal great-grandparents, my gentile great-grandparents, although one of them died shortly before my birth. I never had the chance to know any of my paternal great-grandparents, my Jewish great-grandparents. They were taken from me. I am not alone in my grief. Every Jew has lost family and friends in the Holocaust, which we call the Shoah, the calamity. Despite this deep-rooted ancestral pain, the Holocaust is not an exclusively Jewish trauma, although Jews were its most numerous victims. Yet Amis chooses to write almost exclusively about Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, which is something that a gentile cannot remotely understand or relate to. The passage recounting the story of the bomb baby was especially horrifying to read from the perspective of an irreverent goy. Reading about Jews being “picked up” (Amis 141) from a mass grave, being brought to life with carbon monoxide, and eventually crammed together in their hiding place, behind a removable panel in a cloth factory, while the secondary consciousness of a Nazi doctor looks on with concern, was frankly disturbing. Time’s Arrow is not a new and enthralling retelling of the Holocaust. It is the desecration of the murder of my