The Butterfly and the Axe by Omer Bartov

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A novel challenging the conventional distinction between history and fiction

In this tragic tale, a young Ukrainian is ordered to kill Jews in order to be accepted by the Ukrainian Partisans, a dreadful ordeal he carries in secret to his death.

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About the Book

As a novel, The Butterfly and the Axe—its title gradually becomes heartbreakingly clear—grabs one’s attention and holds it. —Carlin Romano for Moment Magazine

Spring 1944. A Jewish family is murdered in a remote Ukrainian village. Who were they? Who were the killers?

Three generations later, an Israeli woman and a British man of Ukrainian origins set out to find out how their families were implicated in this crime. They also discover how this untold murder has warped their own lives.

Narrated by an unnamed historian, and based on fragments of memories, testimonies, diaries, letters and confessions, this novel seeks to fill a gap in the historical record of the Holocaust by reimagining those who were murdered and erased from memory, and to shed light on the transgenerational effects of trauma.

Omer Bartov was born in Israel and teaches history in the United States. His mother emigrated from Galicia to Palestine before World War II. Most of the rest of his family were murdered under unknown circumstances in the Holocaust.

Launched on 27 January 2023, International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Deborah Kalb Books Blog

Moment Magazine. Review by Carlin Romano

Details

Author: Omer Bartov
Series: New Jewish Fiction
Genres: Holocaust, New Jewish Fiction
Tags: Audio rights available, Foreign Rights Available, Holocaust memoir
ASIN: B0BM9HM9VF
ISBN: 9789493276697
List Price: $16,95
eBook Price: $4,95

Endorsements

Eloquent and beautifully written, Omer Bartov’s The Butterfly and the Axe is a poignant reminder of literature’s capacity to fill in the voids of history. Equipped with the tools of a historian and the sensitivity of a gifted writer, Bartov’s reconstruction of his family’s past is a compelling narrative of the tragedy and richness of Jewish modernity.

– Amir Eshel, author of the poetry collection Between Deserts.

Omer Bartov’s The Butterfly and the Axe is a novel of the Holocaust like no other. The novel takes us on a breathtaking journey into the hearts and minds of our contemporaries still deeply affected by the generational trauma of the Nazi genocide. Many voices speak in his stories, as Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, descendants of victims and perpetrators, try to uncover the roots of memory and to make sense of history. Beautifully written and touchingly authentic, this is a book that will stay with you forever. Many novels have been written about the Holocaust. But if you want to read only one, read The Butterfly and the Axe.

– Elana Gomel, author of Little Sister and Black House

We do not know how it really was, and yet we know, often more than is good for us. After so many novelists have tried to write history, it is fascinating to see what happens when a historian is impelled to write a novel.

– Leona Toker, author of Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps

Omer Bartov is the writer W.G. Sebald imagined himself to be.

– Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winner The Netanyahus

As compelling as it is courageous, The Butterfly and the Axe is a remarkable work of creative historical excavation. Bartov stares straight into the horror of his family’s wartime fate, and in imagining the deaths of those he never knew, rescues them from the mass graves and furnaces of history. It is a noble undertaking, but also an urgent and important one if future generations are to appreciate the tragic human reality behind those almost incomprehensible numbers.

– Bram Presser, author of The Book of Dirt, winner of the National Jewish Book Award

In this moving and imaginative novel, an Israeli woman says that she has spent her life “on the other side of [a] locked door.” What lies beyond is her family’s experience in the Holocaust, which remains a dark mystery to her, as it does for so many Jews today. As one of the world’s leading historians of the Holocaust, Omer Bartov has spent a lifetime trying to illuminate that darkness, but in The Butterfly and the Axe he adds the tools of the storyteller to those of the scholar. Blending fact and fiction, he creates an unforgettable portrait of a few Jewish and Ukrainian lives during World War II. As Bartov writes, when the life of our ancestors is unimaginable, “we must imagine it. We cannot let them die as if they just vanished into thin air.”

– Adam Kirsch, author of The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century

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About the Author

Omer Bartov

Omer Bartov was born and raised in Israel, where he taught history for several years at Tel Aviv University. Shortly before moving to the United States in the late 1980s, he published two Hebrew-language novels, as well as several poems and short stories. Over the last few decades, Bartov has published many historical studies, including, most recently, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon and Schuster, 2018), which received the National Jewish Book Award and was translated to multiple languages, and Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (Yale University Press, 2022). Bartov teaches at Brown University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Butterfly and the Axe is his first English-language novel.

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