Jewish Dog

Finally finished The Jewish Dog. It's a bit hard to write about it from a literary perspective, because, having poured so much time and effort into it, I want it to be excellent.  With that caveat out of the way...

For most of the book, Kravitz juggles the irony of the dog's perspective of the Holocaust compared to the theoretically more advanced humans'.  But, in the end, the dog comes to understand what's going on in the death camps, and I thought that this part wasn't so successful.  By the time he meets his former Jewish master, the story has turned into a fairly straight adventure story, without the levels of awareness that made up the previous sections of the novel.

And then, at the very end of the novel, Kravitz redeems it all in a master-stroke.  Dog and master die, go to heaven, and meet God.  Instead of a full-on discussion of theodicy (which I think wouldn't have worked anyway), Joshua (the dog's owner) argues with God about whether the dog is even allowed into the human heaven.  There's also some studied ambiguity about the Heavenly Dog who appears from time to time in the novel -- what connection does he have to God?

Overall, I think this was a book well worth the time it took to read, although I'd probably counsel slow Hebrew readers (like myself) to skim through the last few chapters until the epilog.