THE GENIZAH: A NOVEL

“Heartbreaking, powerful, poetic, and innovative, this novel deserves its place on every bookshelf.”   

—  Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, international bestselling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child  

“Gorgeously written and one of the most powerful, poetic books I have read, I am in awe of this novel.”  

— Jennifer Rosner, author of Once We Were Home and The Yellow Bird Sings.  

…Definition: Genizah is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial.

In the novel The Genizah, Wayne Karlin enters its pages as a character in his own novel, reimagining his family’s lives—and fate—if they had not come to America but stayed in his mother’s village in Poland where the rest of her extended family were murdered by the Nazis in 1941.

Karlin commemorates and mourns that unutterable loss by making it present, in the spirit of the words from the Passover Seder, which asks those at the table to recount the story of oppression as if they had lived it.

It is a phrase that calls upon the people at the table to feel, not just to know, what happened, as good fiction calls us to do. How can anyone who had not been through the Holocaust share even a little part of such experiences? How can anyone who has not felt some of that horror reverberate in their own bones try to understand the terrible massacres of our own days, sparked by hatred of the Other, in Syria, in Myanmar, in Israel, in Gaza, in Charleston, and in Pittsburgh—in so many other places, they overwhelm our ability to empathize.

Karlin’s answer to that question is to personalize the impersonal, to imagine what could have happened if his grandparents, and mother, and her brothers and sisters and his father and his family, had not torn themselves away from a place they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years, in a town and on a continent where they had always been unwelcome guests.

Read Excerpts:  HERE

Pub Date: October 8, 2024

$18.95 trade paperback; ISBN: 979-8-9866178-2-4

$9.99 ebook; ISBN: 979-8-9866178-3-1

Distributors: Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Overdrive

.Coming Fall 2024

The Genizah is a stunner of a novel, a brilliant re-imagining of the author's own family history. In asking, what if my parents had not left Kolno?, Karlin conjures an alternative course, shining shimmering light on loves and losses and commemorating those who did not escape the Holocaust, many within his extended family. Gorgeously written and one of the most powerful, poetic books I have read, I am in awe of this novel. 

--Jennifer Rosner, author of Once We Were Home and The Yellow Bird Sings. 

In one sense, this is the story of Jewish torment through the ages; but, even more, it is the story of particular persons in whose lives we can see something of our own. In the end, we come to realize that only one distinction should matter: whether we participate in the murder or persecution of vulnerable others, seek to protect them, or stand by while it happens.

— Michael Kinnamon, former General Secretary for the National Council of the Churches of Christ USA and author of A Rooftop in Jerusalem and Summer of Love and Evil, plus others

I“The Genizah is Wayne Karlin’s fiction at its best.  A friend once said: say it clearly and make it beautiful. Wayne Karlin has done this in a book that will be called his masterwork.” — Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate, Playwright