The Revisionist

In a novel that is part love story, part black comedy, and part searing family tragedy, Dr. David Hershleder, a brilliant but tortured Jewish neurologist on the cusp of turning forty, is thrown out of the house by his shiksa wife. He still loves her and his children, but an essential something, the piece of him that should know how to share his heart, is dead. In order to avoid the crushing weight of his loss, he embarks on a research project involving a Holocaust denier. The son of a refugee--a mother whose psychic wounds cast a paralyzing spell over her child's life--Hershleder has a growing fascination with Holocaust denial that makes perverse sense. He becomes more and more obsessed and, with the help of two oddball buddies from college, he finds and confronts a revisionist in Paris, and in the process confronts himself, exploding the lies he has constructed his own life around--his own revisionist history.

Helen Schulman deftly explores both the frightening world of Holocaust denial as well as the more intimate denial that we often use to survive our own lives. With humor and incisive intelligence, The Revisionist examines the dangerous absurdities embraced by the Holocaust's would-be refuters, as well as the havoc the Holocaust still wreaks on the children of Holocaust survivors, a grief that is learned, not earned; a grief that is inherited.