Joseph Skibell. A Blessing on the Moon. Algonquin Books: Chapel Hill, 1997. 256 pp., ISBN 1-56512-179-1.

Remember those nightmares where you are running and not going anywhere, as your pursuer gains ground? You change shapes and the nightmare continues, as whatever is seeking to destroy you also changes shape, mutating into a terror no longer physically definable. You are plummeting to the ground from a high place and wake in your bed, sweaty and exhausted, just before you would have hit the ground. Remember sitting up, swinging your legs over the side of the bed? Remember feeling frustrated, used up and without hope; because, where you should be safe and comforted - in your bed, in your home - a monster has grabbed you by your feet and is pulling you under the bed, and you can no longer deny you are awake?

This is the Holocaust.

You, your friends, and your town are rounded up, taken to the edge of a pit, executed, and buried. You climb your way over the dead bodies and out of the pit...only to find your town pillaged, your home taken over by another family. To all of them, except to their dying daughter, you are invisible. Your rabbi has turned into a crow; your fellow villagers cry out to you from the earth; you bleed from your many gunshot wounds; wolves howl your name; and the moon has disappeared from the sky. You can no longer deny you are dead.

This is A Blessing on the Moon.

Chaim Skibelski has come into a walking, endless, moonless nightmare from which he cannot awake, because he is dead. His friends from the pit judge him for not "rescuing" them sooner. One of the soldiers who executed the townspeople returns, decapitated and toting a gun, intent on re-killing the Jews. Skibelski and his townspeople are made to hope, then fall back into despair, as the nightmare repeats and consumes them over and over again. Even while coming to terms with the fact that he is the key to returning the bullet-ridden moon to the sky, ending his pain is his only motivation.

A Blessing on the Moon reads like a nightmare and feels like truth. At the completion of Chaim Skibelski’s life and death, the reader awakens; but terror has not quite been vanquished.

Jody Cacciatore, Reno