A MAN LIES DREAMING

By Lavie Tidhar

307 pp. Melville House. $25.95.

“How does one write the Holocaust?” That question, buried in the brief but intriguing “Historical Note” appended to Lavie Tidhar’s scabrous pulp-noir, “A Man Lies Dreaming,” remains a relevant and vexed one decades after Theodor Adorno opined that writing a poem after the Holocaust was barbaric. It is relevant because the literature of the Holocaust continues to be written anew, as the first generation of survivors bent on documenting the obscene reality of the ghettos and concentration camps (Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski) has yielded to a second — and now third — generation more at ease with imaginative retellings, be they fictional accounts of the events (Jerzy Kosinski, Imre Kertesz, Leslie Epstein) or alternate histories (Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, Howard Jacobson). It is vexed because the Holocaust still carries an undeniable emotional charge and an inexorable moral weight more than 70 years after it occurred.

And so one may find oneself asking when reading this self-consciously daring but ultimately schlocky sendup, as I did, What did the Holocaust do to deserve this? Other questions I have: When is a genre-bending meta-novel no longer a clever postmodern conceit but merely a pretext for puerile shenanigans? When is laughing in the dark no longer an inspired response to trauma but simply an evasion of unbearable pain? This is not to say that there is no room for humor when it comes to genocide, or what has sometimes been referred to as the “Shoah business” — witness Art Spiegelman’s splenetic “Maus,” the dark comedy of Leslie Epstein’s “King of the Jews” and the grim wit of Martin Amis’s “The Zone of Interest” — but that the satire or parody had better be first-rate.

Tidhar’s novel juggles many literary devices, including ostentatious stylistic borrowings from the hard-boiled ­oeuvre of Raymond Chandler and the use of a novel within a novel, as well as diary notations, endnotes and appropriations from Primo Levi and the writer known as Ka-Tzetnik. Its main plot concerns a down-and-out gumshoe whose nom de guerre is Wolf, on the prowl in dingiest 1939 London some years after the so-called Fall, when National Socialism lost its brief sway over Germany to the Communists in the 1933 elections. Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts are on the rise, beating up Jews and other undesirable types; a serial killer is loose among the whores who gather in Berwick Street; and a gang of Jewish terrorists who call themselves the P.L.O. are demanding a homeland for the Jews. I don’t know whether the true identity of Tidhar’s protagonist is supposed to come as a slow-dawning revelation — it isn’t until Page 274 that he expressly names himself: “I’m Hitler! I’m Hitler! I’m Hitler!” — but for anyone who knows anything about the dictator’s life, the mystery, even without the infamous abridged mustache (“He could no longer abide the mustache”), is short-lived. Coy hints appear already in the opening pages, with an allusion to a woman in Wolf’s past named Geli (Hitler’s real-life niece, to whom he was suspiciously close and who may have killed herself or may have been murdered by Hitler) and a mention of Wolf’s father, Alois, which happens to be the name of Hitler’s father.

Wolf, who seems to have no aptitude for detective work, is hired by Isabella Rubinstein, a beautiful Jewess (“She was a tall drink of pale milk”), to find her sister, who has gone missing somewhere between being smuggled out of Germany and landing in London. He is a rabid anti-Semite, needless to say — “The Jews are nothing but ­money-grubbers, living on the profits of war,” he thinks when Isabella offers him a roll of 10-shilling notes, but he can use the cash. As Wolf descends into the seedier depths of London in search of Isabella’s sister, displaced Nazis of every guise turn up, reminding the private eye of his former power and how far he and his comrades have fallen from their glory days. These range from Rudolf Hess (once deputy Führer to Hitler), who wears “riding boots and a paunch,” to Josef Kramer (called the Beast of Belsen by Bergen-Belsen inmates), who has “a boxer’s round face and a scar on his left cheek.” Along the way we meet up with Ilse Koch, who was the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and known for her sadistic behavior — here she appears as a dominatrix, equipped with a whip and a smile “like a deformed butterfly” — and there are references to various others of the dastardly cast of characters, like “gimp-leg Goebbels,” “fat ruthless” Göring and “ratlike” Julius Streicher.