Aliza in Naziland by Elyse Hoffman; Thought Provoking Graphic Holocaust Dark Fantasy Draws The Line Between Vengeance and Justice

 Aliza in Naziland by Elyse Hoffman; Thought Provoking Graphic WWII Dark Fantasy About Hatred, Revenge, and Drawing The Line Between Vengeance and Justice

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Elyse Hoffman’s previous books like The Book of Uriel weave the stark graphic reality of the Holocaust with fantastic elements borrowed from Old Testament scripture, Jewish folklore, and European myths and legends. These books use these fantastic and dark elements to comment on the challenging themes of mortality, prejudice, Antisemitism, courage, sacrifice, faith, maturity, despair, rebellion, anger, and hatred.

In what is probably her darkest volume yet, Aliza in Naziland, Hoffman takes that combination of Holocaust reality and dark fantasy up to eleven with a novel that asks questions about hatred, revenge, retribution, and punishment.

16 year old Aliza Aueman is a Holocaust survivor living in 1950’s Beth-Hadassa, Maryland with her adopted father and sisters. The family is trying to adjust to living in America and dealing with school, interests, and family dilemmas while also suffering from PTSD, Anxiety, and other problems manifested from their time in Europe. They also have to deal with hateful organizations like the Anti-Semitic Black Sun Brotherhood planning a demonstration. Aliza likes her new life better than the old one, but she still has problems with obeying authority, restraining herself from getting into fights, and feeling powerless. 

One day she receives a mysterious note and a visit from a suspicious looking stranger. He says that his name is Ha-Satan and he is “the Heavenly Prosecutor.” He has a proposition for Aliza. Because Hell has grown too big and there are way too many souls to punish, he has decided to separate Hell into different sections, called Zones, and has appointed random mortals to punish the souls within them. There are specific zones called Naziland. 

Aliza is appointed Master over Zone N-1, the most coveted Zone because it contains the souls of prominent Nazis like Herman Goring, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Hitler himself! All Aliza has to do is order something to happen to them, no matter how humiliating, torturous, painful, or destructive.The punishment is temporary and all she has to do is return every day to inflict it again. 

Aliza gets a thrill out of this chance to inflict pain on her one-time torturers and takes full advantage of this opportunity. But what starts out as fun and games, albeit violent fun and games, becomes more serious when other people get involved and the hatred of the outside world in Maryland bleeds into the inside world of Zone N-1. 

Aliza in Naziland is an interesting premise that asks a lot of tough questions. Questions like how far is too far when you want to seek vengeance? What is the line between justice and revenge? Do the truly hateful deserve everlasting torment and what gives one the right to inflict it? At what point does the victim and survivor become just as heartless and ruthless as their one time persecutor? 

This book doesn’t provide any easy answers so much that it asks the Readers to investigate their own feelings about the matter, and imagine what they would do if they were in this situation. It provides a scenario of what this traumatized troubled outspoken young girl did as she inflicts punishment but also weighs the consequences of that punishment to herself, her own psyche, her family, her community, and her victims.

Aliza is written as someone who has deeply suffered by the hands of the Nazis, of that there is no doubt. Her birth parents were murdered and she was sent to a concentration camp called Fox Farm. She had been tortured, abused, malnourished, and assaulted. Her memories of her birth parents diminished and were replaced by those of Nazis shouting, beating, and shooting prisoners. She can't even remember her life before the Holocaust because it seems so far away and remote. 

The only positive in Aliza’s life since then had been her new family. Her adopted father, Amos smuggled Jewish orphans out of Europe and adopted four girls, including Aliza, who lost their families. Amos looks after his young charges with firmness, kindness, humor, and strength becoming the father figure that they desperately needed. Aliza also formed a family with her newly adopted sisters, Ute, the quirky animal expert, Shaina the dedicated athlete, and Heidi the sweet tempered beauty with Aliza as the outspoken tomboy. 

Aliza and Heidi's relationship is particularly notable throughout the book. Unlike the other three girls who came from Jewish families and suffered persecution, Heidi's father was a Nazi. Her mother and sister were members of a resistance group and were arrested for treason. Heidi became a prisoner in Fox Farm abused by one time colleagues of her father's. While in Fox Farm, Aliza and Heidi bonded and declared themselves sisters even before Amos found them and made their relationship official. 

Heidi refuses to acknowledge her original family and identifies as Jewish, since she converted but there are many in the neighborhood who won't let her forget where she came from.

The abuse in Aliza's past, the anxieties and trauma that the Aueman family still have to live with, the bullying that Heidi receives, and the arrival of Holocaust denying hate groups would make even the most devout pacifistic milquetoast person want to punish those who wronged them especially if they were truly as soulless and hateful as the Nazis. 

At first the punishment chapters are humorous in a dark comic way. Aliza tells the Nazis to shut up and their mouths are sealed. She makes Goebbels bite his tongue. Himmler holds his breath until he suffocates. Goring hangs himself by piano wire. Hitler bashes his head to the ground and breaks every bone in his body and Heydrich carves out his own heart with his knife. 

From this first example alone, we see Aliza has a dark twisted outlook and doesn't mind inflicting it on the Nazis that she is put in charge of. The more time that she spends in Zone N-1 the more grotesque, graphic, and painful the punishments become. She soon acquires a sadistic delight in torturing the men who caused great suffering and whose actions made her miserable after all these years. 

However, Aliza’s conscience gets the better of her at times. She dials back on punishments concerning the Nazi’s families. She doesn't want to put their children through that mental anguish because they had terrible fathers and were often too young, brainwashed, or victimized to fight back. She remembers Heidi's past and doesn't want them to suffer guilt by association.

Aliza begins to question her role in Hell when a classmate reveals that they are also a Zone Master and their punishments are too severe even for her to contemplate. The turning point occurs when she learns that there is a personal connection between one of the tortured Nazis and her own family. Suddenly, things like humanity, compassion, remorse, and real justice occur as she has to weigh the consequences of their actions and her own.

It is important to note that this character evolution is granted to Aliza and not the Nazis themselves. They made their choices in life and are now simmering in their own vile hatred. They are incapable of change becoming vile and pathetic as they cling to their racist and Antisemitic views. They are the defeated bullies who can't do anything else but whine in retreat and insist that they were right.

Aliza herself has to go through this change. She has to know when enough is enough. She is the one in danger of losing herself to hatred and revenge. She has to remember her own humanity and to emerge as a better person who doesn't get swallowed up by the hatred that poisoned her enemies. 

Lit List Short Reviews Imagine, A Kinder Gentler Hitler: An Utter Fantasy by Rob Santana; Druidess: Gates of Eden by Theophilus Monroe

 Lit List Short Reviews Imagine, A Kinder Gentler Hitler: An Utter Fantasy by Rob Santana; Druidess: Gates of Eden by Theophilus Monroe

Imagine, A Kinder Gentler Hitler: An Utter Fantasy by Rob Santana

Spoilers: If you have read books by Rob Santana, you should know to expect the unexpected. An Academy Awards ceremony would be interrupted by the onstage public suicide of the Best Actress winner, like in his book, The Oscar Goes To. (Her ghost is laughing at Will Smith and Chris Rock and  calling them wusses.) An abandoned baby in a dumpster would lead to conflicts involving racism, drug addiction, poverty, and child trafficking, like in Little Blue Eyes. Yes, Santana knows how to make something innocent and disturbing exist side by side.

So it probably wouldn't be too weird for Santana to write an Alternate History or even that it would feature Adolf Hitler. Alternate Histories starring Adolf Hitler are actually quite common, such as if What If The Nazis won WWII, What if Britain and/or The U.S. were led by supporters of the German dictator. Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America, and Phillip K. Dick's The Man in High Castle are good examples of such works.

 One of the more haunting versions is the short story, "Painted Bridges" by Barbara Delaplace in which Hitler remained a painter but still retained his Antisemitism, insanity, and ability to control others, but through his art not his oration. 

So Alternate Hitler is not that unusual especially for an author with a style like Santana's to write. But what this author does to give his work that distinct Santana touch is to turn his version into a picture book!

Yes, you read that right. Santana writes an Alternate History with Adolf Hitler as a nice guy in the form of a picture book. It is strange. It's questionable. It leaves a lot of things open ended. It is completely insane, but the right kind of insane. It's impossible to look away from it. It's something that shouldn't work, but somehow it does.

The illustrations are bright collage style, that border on trippiness. I mean the cover shows Hitler with wings. It looks like something out of Terry Gilliam's animated sequences from Monty Python. It's like playing into someone's fever dream which makes sense since the initial idea does exactly that.

There are some interesting possibilities that are changed because of Hitler's personality shift from brutal Antisemitic dictator and personification of evil to nice guy. For one thing, the post-WWI depression in which Hitler and the Nazi Party used to scapegoat Communists and Jews ends prematurely by the kinder gentler version of Hitler introducing television and the Autobahn early. Hitler has a nice friendly phone chat with Roosevelt which results in them becoming allies and defending each other against their eventual enemies, Russia and Japan.

 In fact the German and American leader's phone conversation is amusing in and of itself. It seems to come out of Dr. Strangelove ("Hi, Adolf, yes I'm fine. You're fine. It's great that we're both fine, Adolf.") 

Tongue is planted firmly in cheek with this alternate scenario and if you get past the weirdness, it's kind of a strange humorous short read. 

This book opens up possibilities about how different the world could be if one slight change were made. However, because this version takes the form of a picture book, it only introduced the original germ or spark of this alternate scenario. Yes, Hitler is a nice guy. His Antisemitism has vanished. The Nazi Party isn't united by his rhetoric and the Holocaust doesn't happen. That's good news, but there are others concerns that this book's short form doesn't allow Santana to bring to surface.

Antisemitism did not begin and end with Hitler. It existed centuries before he was even born. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1919) was a deplorable book of conspiracy theories that accused the Jewish people of being a secret cabal with intentions on ruling the world. Many read it and believed it. Henry Ford reportedly kept a copy by his bedside. There's more than a possibility that if Hitler hadn't had that hatred ingrained in him and the power to speak about it, someone else may have. For example, Josef Goebbels, his Minister of Propaganda, knew how to stretch the truth to fit his agenda. 

This book also still portrays Stalin as being a dictator and he had no conscience or qualms about imprisoning or executing enemies. If Hitler hadn't orchestrated the Holocaust, would he? He was certainly responsible for a lot of deaths. Maybe millions more would be on his hands. In fact, since the Nazis also initially targeted Communists as well as Jews, wouldn't making the Russians and Germans sworn enemies but on opposite sides not have changed things very much?

Speaking of Stalin, there are post-World War II questions to ask. Would the Cold War have begun sooner? In fact, if Hitler didn't commit suicide in this timeline would he have lived to see Germany separated? How would Nice Guy Alternate Hitler have handled the Soviet Union in subsequent years? Remember, the Nazis targeted Communists as well as Jews. They would certainly have no reason to ally with them and their scientists would have no reason to flee Nazi Germany and seek asylum in the U.S. If so, how terrifying is the prospect that two European countries fairly close together both have the ability to make nuclear weapons and are sworn enemies? The United States may not have become a superpower unless Germany shared that science but Europe would have a lot deadlier possibilities. 

What about the Middle East? Would Israel still be allied with the United States? Heck, would it even exist as a nation? How would the issues within those countries have changed or been altered?

These are all ideas that the frame of a picture book can't cover by itself. Santana just presents the original idea, but perhaps he could expand upon it in a novel or a series.

This is a strange book with a completely strange concept. But it definitely is humorous and might ask some intriguing questions.

 

Druidess: Gates of Eden by Theophilus Monroe

Spoilers: I must admit while reading the first chapters of Theophilus Monroe's Druidess: Gates of Eden, I had reservations and misgivings. When the first major conflict involves a young white Irish American woman who is descended from a long line of druids against the reincarnation of an African American former slave woman who practices voodoo in what appears to be a battle of good vs. evil, I admit that my first thought was, "Uh oh." I am glad my first impressions weren't warranted and that I stuck with it. Instead, what I found is a well written character driven fantasy in which different forms of cultural magic are practiced and given equal time and respect.

Joni Campbell is awakened by Isabella, the ghost of of a former slave, who needs her to help her fight Messalina, her older sister who in life made a pact with Baron Samedi, a voodoo loa (or spirit) to help her seek vengeance against her former masters and their descendants. This is important to Joni, who is not only the descendant of one of the sisters' former masters, but her mother and father's family lines come from powerful Irish druids. 

Joni barely has time to process this before Messalina arrives packing heat uh magic and puts Joni's mother in the hospital. So Joni, Isabella, and their new friend, Roger Thundershield, a Choctaw whose family has a historical connection with the Campbells, use their diverse tremendous powers to face Messalina and Samedi.

This is a very smart short novel with two memorable lead characters. 

Joni is a refreshing protagonist in the "Magical Girl" Fantasy Subgenre. She doesn't go through the obligatory "I just want to be normal" whine. It helps that her interest in her family history and reading her ancestor's journal means that she already knows who Isabella is after she introduces herself. Not to mention she already has a belief in the supernatural as evidenced by her comfortable ease with communicating with Isabella's ghost and her acceptance of her family's magical legacy. 

Of course, there are some more dramatic shocking things that throw a curve in her feelings towards her ancestors. They shake her and force her to see another darker more sinister side within her family that she has turned a blind eye towards but now must acknowledge.

However, Joni is determined to help others, especially when people around her are getting hurt. Joni recognizes that she is the heir to an important legacy and she owns it. She even aspires to improve upon the grave wrongs that her ancestors did.

On the other side is Messalina. Thankfully, Monroe makes her just as interesting a character as Joni. Sometimes, the Reader's sympathies shift towards her. She is driven by the rage of having been born and raised a slave. She was molested by a former master and even though the Campbells were kind to the sisters, Messalina has already been severely damaged so she couldn't trust them. (After all, how kind can a person be if they still profit from the buying and selling of human beings?)

 She is fueled by even more hatred at the racism she still sees around her in modern day. One can understand her perspective. However, like many good antagonists, she takes her anger a step too far and attacks innocent people. The truth is, all she wanted was freedom. However, in trying to obtain that she became bonded to another master who was more volatile and crueler than any human one.

There are other characters that are interesting as well. Isabella is wise beyond her youthful appearance and is a great guide to help Joni. Roger also follows his own family lineage and remains loyal towards Joni to the point where he staunchly refuses to give her up when he is being tortured. 

There are some very magical creatures that help and hinder these young people. Joni has a few conversations with some of the Celtic gods that offer suggestions and allow her to find things out for himself. Roger has a powerful relative who packs a surprising enchanting punch. Even Baton Samedi, who is shameless in devouring souls and using Messalina in furthering his agenda of getting more souls, has moments of charm and charisma. A passage where Messalina and Samedi are arguing in a hospital makes them seem more like a comedy team than a malicious duo bent on destroying souls and getting revenge.

Another compelling aspect to the book is how the various cultural magics are written. The book speaks of Celtic, Native American, and Haitian American lore. It's fascinating how these  magical practices bump into each other and how they are looked at by those who observe them. It shows that magic can wear many faces and can change through the eyes of the person observing it. For example, while one might assume that Voodoo is seen as an evil practice, this book shows that's not necessarily true. Isabella herself practices some aspects to it and another character shows a talent towards it. It's more of when a character is bent on hatred and destruction, they are going to attract a spirit who may not have their best interest in mind. 

The Celtic magic practiced by Joni may be seen as good in the book, but members of her family have used it for less altruistic reasons. They followed rigid restrictions to the letter without weighing the emotional consequences. Their hands certainly weren't clean when it came to using their rituals and magic for selfish ends either.

This book shows that no matter the form, magic itself is not evil. However, some using it might have more hateful or selfish intentions that could be turned towards evil purposes.

Druidess appears to be part of several different series written by Monroe as a shared universe. It definitely leaves some things open ended and reveals some other new characters that show magical aptitude. Druidess is definitely a great start.