‘My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done, and my uncle told everyone they should have called me What Were You Thinking.’ So begins, with bitter Jewish humour, this involving book set largely in the Warsaw ghetto.
There is a hint of unnerving pastiche in this, but it is a sentence that finds an echo in the compassionate words of Jim Shepard’s hero, Janusz Korczak, in the final sentence of the book.
Korczak was a real figure, a paediatrician who ran an orphanage in Warsaw, moved with it into the ghetto and, despite being offered several chances of escape, stayed with his charges when transported to the extermination camp at Treblinka.
Aron, the young first-person narrator, is the third son of poor Jews in a Polish village near the Lithuanian border.
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