The Takeaway Men

A girlfriend recommended The Takeaway Men by Meryl Ain. She said it was a nice change of pace for a Holocaust book. Rather than focusing on the atrocities of the Holocaust, it deals with several Jewish families in Northern Queens (New York City) in the 1940s thru 1960s. Of those that lived through the Shoah in Europe, there were some who preferred to keep all their memories and feelings bottled up inside and there were some who felt that it was important to share what they experienced so something so horrific won't happen again. That is very much like real life.

The problem with this novel, though, is that it attempted to cover too much (Holocaust, immigration, religious observance, marital relationships, sibling relationships, death, mental illness, the Rosenbergs trial, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some other things that Ain includes in this relatively short novel. Because it is a short novel, nothing was covered deeply enough for me to feel satisfied. Many of the stories that Ain started to share weren't resolved or were dropped midstream.

I think that Aron, Judy, and their twins, Bronka and JoJo are considered the main characters, but other characters, a whole host of characters, got nearly as much attention. I would have loved to have more to a few of the stories than these relative shallow stories.

I also had a problem with the title, "The Takeaway Men." Unless that was a common phrase used in the 1940s and 1950s, it surprised me that two children, an ocean apart, would use  the same phrase. And while "the takeaway men" make the two appearances in the novel, that's not what the story is really about.

The is Ain's debut novel, and it read like a debut novel. The writing was simplistic and descriptive in a way that doesn't add much to the story. I'm sure there's a phrase to describe this type of reading, but I can't place my finger on that right now.

I'm not sure if I'd recommend The Takeaway Men, and the next time I speak to my friend, I'm going to probe a little deeper to ask her what she thought about different aspects of the book.