About the work
“Monster” is the stage version of the novel of the same name by the Israeli writer and lawyer Yishai Sarid. The book was published by Am Oved in 2017 as “Mifletzet HaZikaron” (“The Memory Monster”); Ruth Achlama's German translation followed in 2019 from Kein & Aber in Zurich. The material first reached the stage as a solo piece: actor Ben Yosipovich adapted the novel for himself, and his monodrama won the prize for best show at the Teatronetto Festival in 2021 before being presented at Habima, Israel's national theatre.
Plot
The text takes the form of a report to the chairman of the Yad Vashem memorial. Its unnamed author, a young Israeli historian, has specialised in the killing methods of the German extermination camps and earns his living as a guide, taking school classes, groups of soldiers and official visitors through the former camps in Poland, among them Treblinka and Majdanek. The deeper he delves into the details of the murder, the more this knowledge takes over his own thinking, while his wife and young son wait for him in Israel. When a German filmmaker tries to recruit him as a Jewish guide for a film project, his crisis comes to a head and he turns violent.
Cultural significance
The novel has been published in German, Italian, French, Polish, Spanish and English, among other languages; the English edition, translated by Yardenne Greenspan, was named one of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2020 and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards. German-language critics, among them the FAZ, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Deutschlandfunk, read the slim book as a pointed examination of the routines of remembrance and of the question of what can be learned from the Holocaust.