NO HEROES

An interesting but predictable autobiographical essay on homecoming and heroism.

Offut, who over the past decade has won kudos for his memoir (The Same River Twice, 1993) and stories of the Kentucky hill people (Out of the Woods, 1999, etc.), attempts an ambitious juxtaposition: a memoir of his return to a teaching job at a small regional college intercut with verbatim transcriptions of his in-laws’ experiences during the Holocaust. The ironic unifying theme is that although home is a sustaining force in the human imagination, we can never actually return there. Offut, a writer and teacher inspired to share his love of books and learning with his “people,” meets insurmountable obstacles in his one-man education crusade. Meanwhile, his in-laws, Arthur and Irene, in recounting their survival in a concentration camp, seem glad just to be alive and entertain no illusions about a return to prewar Europe. There are several problems here. Offut’s desire to play a significant role again in the community of his childhood seems naïve and predictably doomed; it’s never entirely clear how much of his story and dialogue is fictionalized, a distraction in a book that purports to render Holocaust memories faithfully; and the parallel accounts—an idealist frustrated by unmotivated students in Kentucky versus Jews facing death in a Nazi concentration camp—are grossly disproportionate. Offut’s strength has always been the beauty and confidence with which he describes the culture he knows; his commentary on the world of SS men, guard dogs, and barbed wire feels far less assured. There’s an excellent short essay on a rural county’s ability to see through its prodigal son, and many other bright moments, weighed down by awkwardly forced passages involving the author’s affection for his first-grade teacher, muscle cars, trees, and a dead owl.

Well-meant but the components refuse to interlock.