How do you live in a world where unspeakable horrors, including genocide, occur alongside and at the same time as love, beauty and kindness?
The question has haunted me since adolescence, as I began slowly to understand my father’s experience during the Shoah in Greece. I have been writing about it ever since, but began this book in the early 1990s. I have abandoned the project several times, feeling unable to rise to the challenge framed by Theodor Adorno: that literature after Auschwitz is both impossible and essential.
With my late mother, I worked on a book of family writings about the Shoah in Thessaloniki: Talking Until Nightfall was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. I thought I had done my duty towards my father and those who did not survive. But after the loss of my mother and my brother, I am the only person who can tell this story while its urgency grows as brutal war is waged against civilians and murderers sit in government.
History, memory, philosophy, poetry—A Book Worth Burning is a fragmentary response to living with these realities and their unavoidable, unanswerable questions.
François Matarasso 