A Blessing on the Moon
By: Joseph Skibell / Narrated By: Allen Lewis Rickman
Length: 7 hrs
Exceptional; just drop dead, or kinda dead, gorgeous
From the get-go, the sounds of guns cracking echo through the forest, and feeling a thud to his skull but with his awareness intact, Chaim Skibelski is giddy—he’s still alive; they’ve missed him. Seeing the dead all around him, he scurries away from the pit of death where the Nazis have had their say, this roundup of all the Jews of the small village. Chaim makes it back to his house only to discover the Poles have taken their newly-slaughtered neighbors’ homes.
How can they do this, Chaim wonders. And why can’t they see me? He rages against the Polish family in his home, to no avail. Only the family’s tubercular daughter sees it; this he knows when, after a rage, he’s drizzled, and smeared, and poured his blood and bits of brain all over the home. The family is oblivious, but young Ola shrieks in paroxysms of fear and distress. Only to be sent away, back to her bed, which once belonged to Chaim’s own family.
He is dead, but he walks the earth, forever bleeding from his gunshot wounds, his eye near out of the socket, pulped brain seeping from his skull. As he haunts the Polish family, in the first part of A Blessing on the Moon, he develops a relationship with Ola, much to his guilt, he feels a fondness for her; she’s touching, she’s touched. And it’s not until she herself dies and is taken up with much fanfare by a Christian contingent from the Other World, the Next Life, that Chaim, in unutterable agony, moves on.
The village Rabbi, also slaughtered in the extermination, has become a crow. This Chaim follows into part 2, where the two help to unearth the dead. Tho’ dead, tho’ bloody and decomposing, the group begins a journey away from their fresh hell, searching for they know not what. But even then, when Chaim gets separated, he finds there are more ways, even now, to be murdered. A dead German attempts to blow the rest of Chaim’s brains out, only to have his head topple off (Beheaded by a Partisan when he wasn’t looking, tsk tsk). Fueled by guilt again, and a certain fascination, Chaim now has a relationship with the dead German’s head as he tries to find the body to set it back upon. Through this sort of friendship, Chaim asks Little Head how many times they can kill the Jews, is there no end?
Author Joseph Skibell writes the whole story to where we ourselves wonder the same thing. Was there no end to what was done to Jews during the Holocaust? Because when reunited with the decomposing corpses who are searching, wandering, searching, they come upon their own Heaven, and each person is reunited with family members who they’d hoped had survived, had gotten away, but no, are dead even so. Chaim sees his children with joy, but he wonders: Did no one survive? Why? How could this happen? And even such glorious afterlife reunions end in the harrowing as Skibell pushes it further, further, further, to the ovens further. Hell does not end. There are even more times to die.
The final part, we don’t know what time we’ve come to, but the escaped Chaim has found his way yeeeeears into the future, and he comes upon two Hasidic Jews who’ve been waiting for him. You see, they kinda sorta accidentally sank the moon, and only Chaim can help them set it to rights. How, Chaim bellows, are you still alive? How have you hidden yourselves away when so many are dead? To find the moon, he must make peace with the men, make peace with what’s happened, get the job done and return the moon to its proper place.
Does this sound brooding and dark? Well, yeah, it’s kinda sorta a horror show of atrocities that became the everyday for yeeeeears during the War. That the Jews have accepted bullets to their brains, have gone into the ovens, have wandered the earth without comfort is nothing save heartbreaking. But oh how brilliantly this is written, what lovely prose! And there are so many chuckles and instances where a guffaw broke free from my throat, which was odd considering that most of the way through this, I had a decidedly large lump in said throat. But Chaim is nothing if not a keen-eyed observer, a wry commentator of the human condition, a flawed man trying to live with anger, even as he loyally carries Little Head with him in a sack (What an image!).
That there can be the tragic? Oh yes, think of a little boy beaten to death by Nazis who now, in this magical afterlife limps. But he’s so very loved by the group, his physical failings are considered and adapted to as each person helps him along as they wander, heading heaven only knows where. Think Chaim realizing a much-loved wife might exist in this new world also. Or has she headed to the ovens? Or is she safe, along with the daughter she died bearing? There is hope that goes hand in hand with the fear, the terror.
All this is narrated by Allen Lewis Rickman, and he turns in an extrAORdinary performance. The prose rolls from his tongue, making it reach the ear as the smoothest of poetry. Each outrage, each tender mercy, relayed in the most vivid of ways. You don’t even realize you’re being emotionally eviscerated because Rickman has you chuckling as tho’ Chaim is bumbling along even when he’s actually staggering, pouring blood from a multitude of wounds.
You want a light listen that’ll have you jauntily whistling a tune? Oops, this is NOT it. But if you want the truth of history in a way you can hear it, feel it, absorb it, leaving you haunted by a time when people looked away, making you wonder how your own heart would deal with such times, all the while shouting out great barks of laughter (Seriously, Little Head, the murderer who is now so very woeful cuz Chaim stepped on his glasses… totally and sweetly hiLARious)?
Well then, my friend, allow me to recommend this book. With Rickman doing the honors, with Skibell’s outstanding story crafting, A Blessing on the Moon is exceptional and will stay with you loooooong after the music fades away…
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