Bookpossum, I wouldn't say that I feel people generally exploit the Holocaust, but rather that it is an oft-used choice when choosing something heavy and horrific to include in a book. It can feel possibly a bit easy to me, as if it were the "It was a dark and stormy night" of recent war horrors, unless the author has some personal connection to it spurring them on. I agree that Michaels' goal was to write, as you say, "a meditation on those experiences of horror, grief, loss and the need to remember."
I've looked into it further just now and her direct family wasn't involved in the Holocaust as her mother is from Canada and her father immigrated from Poland before the war, but her extended family was - all of her father's relatives seem to have perished. I found it in
this article. The first paragraph was especially interesting given the criticism we're discussing:
Quote:
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"Not another book on the Holocaust,” a friend of author Anne Michaels lamented, as he came across a new book on the subject, unaware that the first novel Michaels was then working on had a Holocaust theme. “That galvanized me in an important way,” she tells The Jewish Week. “What kind of book could I write that would reach that reader, who felt like he had read it all?” It was a question that Michaels asked herself repeatedly in the 10 years it took her to complete Fugitive Pieces (Knopf).
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