Aaron Kreuter, author of “Rubble Children” Courtesy of Aaron Kreuter

By Julia M. Klein
15 August 2024

Trümmerkinder: Seven and a half stories
By Aaron Kreuter
University of Alberta Press, 232 pages, $27

The linked stories by Aaron Kreuters Children of the rubble revolve around the community, rituals, politics and internal struggles of a fictional Reform synagogue in a suburb of Toronto.

Kol B’ Seder in Thornhill is the embodiment of thoroughly modern Judaism. Here the story of the Holocaust is (mainly) a unifying element and Israel (inevitably) a point of contention. By day, congregants squabble over the prospect of a Palestinian speaker. By night, teenagers roam the temple and more forbidden areas, indulging their budding passions.

Kreuter is interested in the most everyday crises in life. For adolescents, this can be an endless, exhausting pursuit of drugs or sudden changes in love and loyalty that can take on tragic proportions. For middle-aged people, it can be relationships that are shattered by political disputes or nurtured by a shared love of birdwatching.

At its core Children of the rubble is the struggle to define Jewish diaspora identity in a challenging world. Kreuter asks what it might mean to be Jewish in the shadow of the Holocaust and without unwavering or uncritical loyalty to Israel. Although the stories certainly predate the October 7 massacre and the war in Gaza, these events make them seem more current, relevant, and even prescient.

Kreuter’s main literary device is a blunt realism, populated by recognizable characters engaged in familiar squabbles. Yet his plots sometimes go far beyond the mundane, employing wildly satirical humor and dystopian flights of fantasy. Each story, Kreuter explains in his acknowledgments, is a “mixture of truth, memory, fantasy, improvisation, and reading.”

The funniest story – perhaps intended as a half-story – is “Tel Aviv – Toronto Red Eye: A Dialogue,” an epistolary story that satirically pokes fun at both literary publishing and Jewish politics. The premise is that writer Stephanie Krasner has just received a contract from a magazine called Moose and Seal, which bills itself as “Canada’s national magazine.” (In fact, there is a well-known Canadian magazine similar to Harper’s called The Walrus.)

The news is both welcome and unexpected: Stephanie apparently never sent the story to the magazine. But the editorial process soon becomes the “dark and dangerous journey” that an editor promises her. The dispute begins with a single political quibble. It ultimately culminates in a blanket rejection of her story, which concerns a sexual encounter between a Palestinian-American woman and a Jewish woman in an airplane bathroom.

“So you admit you hate yourself?” the editor writes. “We had our suspicions… In fact, we recommend that you change the entire plot.” The exchange reads like a writer’s fever dream, as the editor relentlessly poke around in Stephanie’s psyche and threatens not to publish at all.

Another story, “The Krasners,” in which Stephanie plays a minor role, is impossible to characterize. It begins with a description of the anxieties of adolescence, goes through political conflicts, develops into a crime story, and ends as a counterfactual story.

Kreuters teenagers experience “a free-floating, general fear …, the fear of belonging, the fear of saying the right thing, the fear of a rebellious body.” That seems strange or perhaps inaccurate. Aren’t young people afraid of the opposite – not fit in, not say the right thing?

Flashing back to the past, the narrator remembers Kol B’Seder as a place of community where “the fire of the Holocaust was always immediately healed with the balm of Israel.” He then introduces the eponymous Krasners, one of the six founding families of the Temple, with all the privileges that entails.

After a night of political debate (during which the narrator’s uncle takes the most staunchly anti-Israel stance), a group of boys break into the Krasner mansion. From then on, the boys’ pranks become increasingly illegal. Suddenly we find ourselves in an improbable world where even a massive, seemingly easily uncovered crime goes unpunished.

Only then, with little warning and even less explanation, does the “real horror” of the story begin. Tanks roll in – from where or for what purpose, we never find out. The various consequences, we are told, include “hideous compromises,” escape, and, for the narrator, guilt so “vast” that it “drowns out everything else.” There is something experimental about the story, the disparate elements of which, while entertaining, never quite fit together.

Kreuter also plays with counterfactual history in “A Handful of Days, A Handful of Worlds.” The story revolves around a lesbian couple whose relationship falls apart in a series of imaginary realities. The title comes from a collection by the now quite successful author Stephanie Krasner, in which one of her stories is about early Zionists colonizing Iceland instead of Palestine.

In Kreuter’s story, the date is always May 2, 2018 (until the very end). In the first world he proposes, Israel is now Israel/Palestine, and truth and reconciliation hearings are underway. This new state has “no ethnic hierarchy, no occupation, no occupying army.” In another reality, Israel has instead drifted to the right and passed laws making every Jew in the world a citizen. In yet another reality, Jews and Arabs founded the country together, completely bypassing the region’s contested history.

Significantly, this is the final point of the collection, which Kreuter concludes with the title story. It tells the adventures of a group of teenagers obsessed with the Holocaust. They call themselves the Rubble Children and their motto is: “It happened once. It can happen again.”

The book, Kreuter writes in the acknowledgements, is “for all the children who live and die in the rubble.” He hopes, he continues, for “a world without borders, without bombs, without rubble.” This utopian and anti-nationalist vision will obviously not appeal to everyone. Kreuter has Stephanie defend it in a radio interview: “This institutional fear of fiction that challenges the Jewish mainstream is precisely the reason why such fiction must be written.”