A Teacher of the Holocaust and Other Stories

In Teichman’s (co-editor: Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust, 1994) short story collection, characters strive to form meaningful connections to each other and to their traditions.

In the collection’s first, titular story, set in New York City and the surrounding areas in 1975, a divorced professor named Martin begins a relationship through the classifieds with a Frenchwoman named Rachel, who is a Holocaust survivor. While seemingly a simple tale about two lonely, middle-aged people looking for love, the story highlights the immense gulf between European Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and their American cousins who escaped it, “by an accident of fortune.” The second story in the collection features a different professor; he also teaches a course on Holocaust literature and also meets an unstable woman who challenges his worldview. In this case, the woman is a half-Jewish student whose plan to formally convert to Judaism is derailed by her bouts with mental illness. In each of the book’s 12 stories, there are small, but unbridgeable, distances between the characters, be they professor and student, parent and child, man and wife, two friends or two brothers. The majority of these characters are Jewish men who came of age in New York in the years following World War II. Their stories reflect not only settings, but sensibilities of the mid- to late 20th century. While Teichman’s stories are by no means groundbreaking, they are well-crafted. Fixations on aging and health, as well as the frequent views back toward the second world war and the Holocaust, mark this as an older generation’s book, though these calm, experienced stories hold meaning for readers of any age. Teichman’s protagonists are men who live largely in the world of the mind, and much of their stories’ action is internal. Small transgressions are committed. Small mercies are granted. Small redemptions are achieved. Ultimately, the reader is left with a simple message: “A man can do wrong, but he can improve.”

A quiet, satisfying collection well-situated in the American Jewish literary tradition.