The Holocaust Runner by Allan Appel

The Holocaust Runner by Allan Appel

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The Holocaust Runner – meet an average guy, a middle-aged American jogger, who travels to Berlin to run around the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. And, while running, he’ s there to recite the names of the dead., especially those who have no family to mourn them.

That’s it! And yet, of course, stuff begins to happen. The dead begin to speak to him, he to them, and the local polizei are suspicious, as are the neo-Nazis.

Yet the novel is anything but a straight-told tale. It is a post-modern work of literary fiction –set in today’s Berlin, New York City, or any city in any country where the troubled past is alive in the present. It weaves together, in one concise and compelling innovative form, our entire cultural obsession with the Holocaust and more generally how we use or abuse the past, especially its worst human tragedies. It is also particularly timely given the rise of antisemitism and acts of violence today. And somehow the novel also has a sense of humor!

I think in this book I’ve brought together a kind of summa of my work life as a writer at Jewish institutions, museums, and libraries over the years; as a novelist; and for the past 20 years as a journalist. There are also my concerns – call them obsessions – with history, World War Two, God, doubt and faith, meditation and memory, and the unforgiving mystery of the evanescence and meaning of Time itself.

In short, I tried to write a book about someone who wants to do more than remember; that is, about someone who doesn’t trust how we have been taught to remember. Such tools, he feels, are insufficient for the challenge of the present moment. He turns his life over to the goal of doing far more than write a history or build a museum or raise a marble memorial, or say a kaddish. It’s a book about a character who wants to do something all of us are desperate to do when we lose someone we love: we want to find a way to rescue the dead.

When I began writing, mainly poetry, back in 1968, I came across a poem by David Ignatow entitled “Rescue the Dead.” I think without my being quite conscious of it The Holocaust Runner was born in me there and then; it just took a while, about a lifetime, for it to emerge. The last two stanzas are:

To live is to sign your name,
is to ignore the dead,
is to carry a wallet
and shake hands.

To love is to be a fish.
My boat wallows in the sea.
You who are free,
rescue the dead

Of course there are other influences whose brew includes Kafka, Mel Brooks, Joseph Conrad, and a love for unreliable narrators such as Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita, Fitzgerald’s Nick in The Great Gatsby, and especially Mario Vargas Llosa’s storytellers in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The best unbelievable narrators, of course, tell at least some truths some of the time. And when something is, to begin with, so horrible you don’t want to acknowledge human beings did that to each other, maybe the imagination, that is, fiction –with its unique ability to time-travel and with the intimacy of the driver/narrator whispering in your ear  – perhaps that is the best way to travel to places we might not be able otherwise to reach. I hope so.

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Description

  • Kind: Perfectbound
  • Pages: 352
  • Language: English
  • Date Published: September 16, 2026
  • ISBN 978-1-962847-55-1

Praise

This new novel, The Holocaust Runner, is both a tour de force and a post-modern literary event of utmost cultural importance. With dazzling prose that propels the reader forward, the story—at once obsessively serious and yet macabrely hilarious—condenses and transcends the dilemma of Holocaust remembrance in one man’s manic, ingenious, and finally profound answer to the unanswerable.

This is not ‘Holocaust fiction,’ no false or misguided substitution for authentic memoirs from the Shoah. Without dwelling on the maladies of the present, the novel is located in today’s world of pandemics, outrageous invasions and mass shootings. At once desperate, philosophical, and full of wisdom, it presents a compulsively readable melding of the disconcertingly Kafkaesque with the manic Jewish wisecracks of Mel Brooks’s The Producers.

Above all it funnels through one man’s psychic struggle for action, a stunning awareness of the complex dimensions associated with how we confront, individually and collectively, one of history and culture’s most central and urgent of mysteries. At the same time it is a must-read for anyone who cares about how we can live, and go on living, in a harsh world where life is precarious and love is vital.

There is nothing out there like The Holocaust Runner. It deserves our widest attention.’’

—Jud Newborn, PhD, Founding Historian,
New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust;
Co-author, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose;
Honoree, The Anne Frank Center’s “Spirit of Anne Frank Human Writes Award”

How can you devote yourself to honoring the dead without ultimately becoming a ghost yourself? And how, having become a ghost, can you navigate the arduous route back to the living? Allan Appel’s The Holocaust Runner is a stunning achievement that addresses these questions with poignancy, tenderness, courage, and wild humor. It’s a wholly original and even important book. —Steve Stern, novelist, Author of Frozen Rabbi

The title of this genre-defying new novel suggests an encounter with something one has never met before: a melding of incommensurable worlds, of mutually alien rituals and genres, of lamentation and romance. It is from this immediacy that The Holocaust Runner draws its power, almost like a new kind of litany. Appel knows that the Holocaust isn’t over, and that it will go on as long as the work of mourning its losses remains unfinished. —Marc Kaminsky,  Author of Kafka’s Axe

Excerpt

In many respects I was a normal child. I spent hour upon hour poring over the picture books we had: Greek mythology, battles of the Bible world, storing away odd facts like how that word Armageddon is probably related to the real place Megiddo in the Holy Land. I played dress-up in the merchandise, caps and uniforms, a smart, Eisenhower-style jacket, a British knapsack from the Burma campaign, and concentration camp “pajamas” which, unusually, we had many of—even though my parents told me not to.

Although they were in commerce Bernard and Ruth, my parents, were unusually kind businesspeople, self-taught, un-degreed historians, bookish shopkeepers and autodidacts, who took in perhaps many more items than they should. What were your parents like, Machla?

Many of the old people, like Mr. Ginzburg, were living on tiny pensions and desperately needed the money their transactions with Bernard and Ruth provided. Even at a very young age I understood what was going on—the pajamas and caps and badges and yellowing transit visas—were treated in a different way.

The customers were by and large older Europeans who spoke an English very different from what you heard on television or in school. They had canes and limps and smelled of camphor, and stumbled and once in a while actually tripped over one of the piles or the splayed legs of the chairs in the shop. Before I was thirteen I had applied iodine and Band-Aids to more than one Holocaust survivor, once on a wrist near a tattooed number, and those gestures were among the most meaningful of all the years of my childhood.

Bernard once said he was afraid that some customers might shatter on the floor like old thin glass. I wasn’t going to let that happen. Without words being spoken, this became almost a kind of commission for me at the store, and I gladly accepted it.

Author

Allan AppelAllan Appel has published eight novels, a biography, two collections of poetry, an anthology of quotations about the end of the world, and a collection of stories about escape and survival in the Holocaust (To Life/36 Stories of Memory and Hope, Bullfinch Press/AOL Time Warner Book Group), a publication of the New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, where Appel worked as a writer and development officer for five years. Of his novels, The Rabbi of Casino Boulevard (St. Martin’s Press) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and High Holiday Sutra (Coffee House Press) was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers awardee. Those novels, and his The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air (2009, Coffee House Press), have been optioned for the stage or screen. His most recent novel, The Book of Norman (Mandel Vilar Press) is a theological comedy and sibling rivalry tale that is also a ground-breaking exploration of Jewish-Mormon relations. His plays have won prizes and have been performed in Los Angeles, New York, New Haven, and Provincetown, among other venues. Appel is a member of Authors Guild and The Dramatists Guild, and has won two fellowships in fiction from the State of Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

Appel holds degrees in writing and comparative literature from Columbia University and City University of New York, and he attended the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He has taught writing and literature most recently at Yale College, and in New York City schools, public and private, and at colleges in New York and New Jersey. He has worked extensively as a writer for non-profit cultural institutions, including The New York Public Library, The American School for Classical Studies at Athens, and The American Museum of Natural History. He has been the Director of Institutional & Foundation Giving at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in New York City. Married, with two grown children, he lives near New Haven, Connecticut, where for the last twenty years he has been a reporter and staff writer for the online newspaper New Haven Independent.

Additional information

Weight 23 oz
Dimensions 9 × 6 × 1 in