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    A Blessing on the Moon
    A Blessing on the Moon
    A Blessing on the Moon
    Audiobook7 hours

    A Blessing on the Moon

    Written by Joseph Skibell

    Narrated by Allen Lewis Rickman

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    At the center of A Blessing on the Moon is Chaim Skibelski. Death is merely the beginning of Chaim's troubles. In the opening pages, he is shot along with the other Jews of his small Polish village. But instead of resting peacefully in the World to Come, Chaim, for reasons unclear to him, is left to wander the earth, accompanied by his rabbi, who has taken the form of a talking crow. Chaim's afterlife journey is filled with extraordinary encounters whose consequences are far greater than he realizes. Not since Art Spiegelman's Maus has a work so powerfully evoked one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century with such daring originality.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateSep 7, 2010
    ISBN9781615735334
    A Blessing on the Moon

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    Reviews for A Blessing on the Moon

    3.5/5

    54 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book. Wow! Amazing! I'd never before heard of either this book or the author. I found it a while ago at The Book Thing of Baltimore. It looked interesting so I grabbed it. I'd just finished a light, funny book so I was in the mood for reading something deeper. Deeper it was. It starts in wartime Poland in which an entire community of Jews are executed and left dead in a giant pit. One of the Jews starts moving and rattles to life. Or is it life? No, it seems he's still dead, but he has the ability to scramble out of the pit and move around. His first stop is the house that used to belong to him and his family. There he finds a Polish family so he moves in unseen (as he must be a ghost? Right? Or not?) and lives among this family. This, I soon discover is a truly horrifying and imaginative Holocaust novel. It turns into a fable (or maybe not?). In any case, it is totally different from any other wartime novel I have ever read. One of the characters I loved from this book was the Rebbe...who became a crow! His idea was to take all of the Jews who were able to come back from the dead to The World to Come (that is, if there is/was/will be such a place. Who knows?)I'd rather not give away the rest of this story. Should you usually opt out of reading Holocaust literature, you might want to give this book a try as it's not violent and is extremely creative.
    • 5/5
      This is a startling Holocaust story. Right from the beginning the language grips you and grips you hard. Chaim Skibelski, a 60 year old Polish man, is shot along with hundreds of fellow Jews. He has been left to bleed out in a stinking heap. Murder doesn't turn out to be very peaceful for Chaim. As a ghost-like entity caught between Life and The World to Come, he is condemned to roam with his former rabbi-turned-talking-crow, Rebbe. Together they are in an alternate afterlife trying to find purpose. That is the burning question. Why were they left behind? When Skibelski returns to his small Polish village he finds it overrun with non-Jews. They have moved into his house dragging their prejudices behind them.Dear readers beware: while Skibell's writing sometimes evokes magical imagery, the time frame is dark and tragic so definitely expect violence, destruction and decay. It is at once gory and gorgeous. The worms crawl in. The worms crawl out. Skibelski continuously bleeds from the bullet holes. His face is half missing. Corpses and his family and friends rot and stink and fall apart like a zombie movie. While listening to this on cd I was taken aback when Skibelski started to bleed from his anus. Fear not, dear readers. You get used to it. You will even learn to laugh at it.In all honesty, I could see this as a Tim Burton film. There is sex and even humor amid the putrid. One of my favorite scenes was when Skibelski comes across a decapitated German soldier trying to kill him again. Yes, you read that right. Skibelski kicks the soldier's head down a hill all the while arguing with the soldier about why he doesn't need to die again. The dialogue is to die for (pun totally intended).
    • 4/5
      I loved this book. It was well written and a perfectly weaved tale. This most definitely is unlike what I normally read, and I think that made it refreshing as well. I loved feeling the main characters emotions and turmoil throughout.
    • 3/5
      At some intervals I thought this was sharp, funny, and unusual. At other intervals I thought it was fantasy pablum ala Mitch Albom.
    • 3/5
      the first chapter was a use of magical realism that i thought was done well. it involved a polish child who was horrified by her family's behavior toward jews. however, the rest of the book about losing the moon did not work for me.
    • 4/5
      This unique, compelling tale of one man among the Holocaust's many Jewish dead is as fantastic as the thought that so many people could be murdered for so little reason. It opens at the end of Chaim Skibelski's life:"It all happened so quickly. They rounded us up, took us out to the forests. We stood there, shivering, like trees in uneven rows, and one by one we fell. No one was brave enough to turn and look."Chaimka is dead but his spirit returns to his village, where he finds his house taken over by a Polish family, whose tubercular daughter is the only living being who can see his presence. He takes care of her for what appears to be several years, until she dies and is instantaneously transported to her Heaven on a golden chariot.What of all the Jews, still lying in their mass grave in the forest? What of Chaim, who has had the guidance of his rabbi, now in the form of a crow, and who has shown kindness toward the dying girl and forebearance toward those who stole his property? Where is their World to Come?As Chaim's fantastical afterlife continues, he reunites with the other townspeople murdered by the Germans and they embark on a trek that ends at a bizarre hotel on the other side of a healing stream. This might have been a happy ending, but it is anything but, and the slaughtered Chaim resumes his wandering quest for the eternal resting place. "Am I really expected now to carry on," he asks his merciless God, "without even a death to ransom me?"Despite the grim setting, "A Blessing on the Moon" is full of humor, and even the comedy of brothers-in-law Kalman and Zalman, who are trying to remedy the strange fate of the moon, which vanished soon after that horrible day in the woods. On meeting Chaim, they begin to argue over who was married to which twin sister. "Zalman shrieks. 'It's you, Kalman' who has forgotten who doesn't remember!' 'One of us doesn't remember,' Kalman says kindly, making peace, 'but whic one it is, to tell you the thruth, we can no longer recall.'"Author Joseph Skibell dedicates the book to his great-grandparents, among them Chaim Skibelski, who one can hope had as rich an afterlife as the character who bears his name.
    • 4/5
      Contrary to Chaim Skibelski's expectations, the World to Come has not, since his death in a Polish pogrom. Instead, he and his fellow killed Jews are stuck in an in-between not-life, uncertain where to go after everything has been taken from them. Their previous homes are occupied, their town has been obliterated, and the sweet simplicity of either a satisfying afterlife or an oblivious death are denied to them. So they wander through this liminal existence, without clear direction or anyone who seems to know what's going on or who's in charge.The book became more poignant for me after reading the post-script material: Joseph Skibell wrote this as a sort of memoir for his grandparents, and Chaim Skibelski was a real individual with his real family. Yet the fictionality and the magical realism that generally embody the novel displace it from real pogroms or the actual events of the Holocaust. In this way, victims of the Holocaust are displaced from only 'victim' status, and allowed to stand as actual characters and people. The narrative hangs on the question of post-Holocaust Jewish identity: "What now?" Yet it's not an answer that reforms the broken group - certainly God doesn't show up to hand out explanations - but the ongoing struggle against the question itself. It's an unusual and valuable work of Jewish literature that can engage with the Holocaust so much while actually depicting it so minimally.