Word: cohn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DANCE OF GENGHIS COHN by Romain Gary. 244 pages. World...
...Genghis Cohn, a Yiddish music-hall comedian, is on his last stage. The stage is Auschwitz, and his audience is a German firing squad. But he seizes the opportunity for a last punch line. He turns his naked rump to the executioners and says: "Kush mir in tokhes!," which in Yiddish means "Kiss my ass!" Herr Captain Schatz, the man who has been placidly shooting Jews down on order, is so shaken that he accords Cohn the unusual respect of examining the corpse and ordering it clothed. Seeing an opportunity to keep his act going, Cohn's ghost slips...
...this unlikely premise, Romainian Gary has constructed a wildly funny, and ultimately mordant picaresque novel. The time is 20 years later, and Schatz has become police chief of a German town, though still captive straight man to Genghis Cohn's raucous spirit. "It has been my fate," says Cohn, "to add a new dimension to the legend of the Wandering Jew: that of the immanent Jew, omnipresent, entirely assimilated, forever part of each atom of the German earth, air and conscience." Night after night, he sits on Schatz's bedpost, teaching him Yiddish and the art of Jewish...
Schatz, accompanied by his ghost, is confronted with the murders of 22 men, all of whom were discovered with their pants off and beatific smiles on their faces. "It's the crime of the century," says Schatz. Cohn, as a representative of 6,000,000 slaughtered Jews, looks at him reproachfully...
...savagery of Gary's vision. Lily is described by a German admirer as "a being of exquisite sensitivity. Culture! That's what she lived for. She walked in beauty! She inspired heroism and sacrifice! Our students were taught to love her, even in kindergarten!" To which Genghis Cohn replies sardonically with a reminiscence of the moment when he and his fellow victims were digging their own grave before their execution: "Sio-ma Kapelusznik moved a bit closer to me, winked, and then said: 'Culture is when mothers who are holding their babies in their arms are excused...