Tarantula

'We woke up to screaming. In the doorway stood the silhouette of Samuel Blum, our friend and unconditional protector, now uniformed in black and carrying a club. Crawling down his left arm, I slowly noticed, was a huge tarantula.' In 1984, twelve-year-old Eduardo is sent to the mountains for what his parents describe as Jewish summer camp. What it turns out to be is an immersive re-enactment of a Nazi concentration camp. Decades later, on the other side of the world, Eduardo sits across a table from a stranger. This is Samuel Blum, the Jewish camp counsellor who transformed into a terrifying Nazi commandant all those years ago. Now he is an old man, and he is ready to talk. Tarantula is a novel about individual and collective inheritance, individual and collective violence; about memory, trauma, connection and estrangement. It asks what it means to be a Jew living in the long aftermath of the twentieth century, and how the past lives on the present.