A Meal in Winter

Starred review from March 21, 2016
In Mingarelli’s brief, haunting novel, his first translated into English, three German soldiers—Emmerich, Bauer, and an unnamed narrator—all emotionally damaged by their role in executing Jewish prisoners on behalf of the Third Reich, request permission to search the Polish countryside for outliers. “We explained to him that we would rather do the hunting than the shootings,” the narrator reports of a discussion with their commander. “We told him we didn’t like the shootings.” On patrol in freezing cold the next morning, the soldiers discover a young Jew hiding in an underground warren and begin the slog back to the barracks with him in tow. On the way, they stop at an unused house for a meal of soup, during which a Pole and his dog arrive. The dynamic among the men shifts as the soldiers try to glean the Pole’s intentions and debate whether to release their prisoner or to seal his fate by returning with him to camp. Simple declarative sentences and crystalline, cinematic vignettes accrete to give voice to the soldiers’ own shortcomings and fears about their life-and-death decision. With devastating concision, Mingarelli and his translator, Sam Taylor, carry the moral dilemma to an understated yet stunning conclusion.

Starred review from May 1, 2016
A simple Holocaust story presents a complex moral equation. The first work by this French author to be translated into English, this short novel from 2012 packs a punch. The narrator is apparently a German soldier stationed in Poland during a very cold winter of World War II. His camp's main mission seems to be the extermination of Jews by capturing and shooting them. The narrator and his two comrades have no stomach for the killing, but their only recourse is to go searching for Jews in the countryside and bring them back instead. "We would rather do the hunting than the shootings," he tells his base commander, a reservist like him, in the plainspoken, matter-of-fact diction that characterizes the narrative and adds to its chilling conclusion. "We told him we didn't like the shootings: that doing it made us feel bad at the time and gave us bad dreams at night." So the narrator and his two very different compatriots embark on a long, frigid search, and they in fact encounter a "Jew," the first time this word is used, a third of the way into the novel. Despite a language barrier, they communicate that they are bringing him back to camp. Much of the second half of the novel finds the three soldiers and their captive in a deserted hovel where they find temporary refuge from the cold: "The house appeared from behind a row of trees. We didn't need to talk about it. The decision was made by our stomachs and the icy sky." They then face a number of other survival decisions: how to cook, eat, and stay warm. The intrusion of a Polish hunter from the countryside further complicates their situation. Though another language barrier presents itself, it is obvious that the Pole's hatred of the Jew is more intense than anything the soldiers feel. As they spend time and share food together, the captors experience some subtle shifts. Over the course of "the strangest meal we ever had in Poland," the narrator and his cohort wrestle with the morality of delivering their captive to camp. The command of tone and voice sustains tension until the very last page of a novel that will long resonate in the reader's conscience.

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June 15, 2016

Grenoble-based Mingarelli, winner of France's Prix de Medicis, shows us World War II through one spare, fierce, quietly affecting moment. Deep in the Polish winter, three German soldiers are sent from their barracks on a standard mission--go into the surrounding countryside and round up a Jew for execution. They're not altogether happy with their task--one of the soldiers, named Emmerich, is more worried about his son at home--but they haven't reached a point of aroused conscience either. After locating a victim and dragging him from his underground hideout, they wind up in a dark, freezing hut, trying to build a fire and cook a meal. A Pole knocks to be let in, and the entire group shares a tense and sullen meal. It does prompt Emmerich to cry out, "'How many have we killed?'...it's making us sick." Yet will that change their actions--or their fate? VERDICT Fine reading, not just for those interested in the war.

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