Professor Schiff's Guilt

December 1, 2022

An Israeli professor journeys to an imaginary West African nation to track a slave-trading ancestor but runs afoul of laws there prohibiting anyone from profiting off the proceeds of enslavement. Examining racism, colonialism, and the Holocaust, award-winning Israeli author Schiff asks whether the professor's quest is legitimate or merely a trendy ploy that's enslavement in another guise. With David Grossman, translator Cohen won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Translation.

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Starred review from March 13, 2023
Schiff (The Latecomers) delivers a daring post-colonial satire about a professor who inadvertently gets wrapped up in human trafficking in modern-day Tel Aviv. Agur Schiff, 63, tries to collect a debt from a lawyer who, in lieu of money, “gives” Schiff his cleaning lady, an undocumented migrant named Lucile, as “payment.” Schiff is deeply offended, but he immediately falls in love with the wise and beautiful Lucile. He pays her to work as a companion to his wife’s wealthy, 104-year-old step-grandfather, who soon proposes marriage to Lucile, to the lovelorn professor’s dismay. But before there can be a wedding, Lucile’s husband shows up demanding a blackmail payment, and Schiff tips off the immigration authorities. The husband flees, but Lucile is then herself deported. Distraught over losing Lucile, the professor travels to an unnamed West African capital where the shipwrecked remains of his ancestor’s merchant vessel are now in a museum, and where Schiff reckons with his family’s involvement in the slave trade. The author takes a clear-eyed view of the horrors of slavery and its present-day consequences without slipping into didacticism or sacrificing the humor of his protagonist’s absurd actions. It’s a blistering skewering, and as sharp as it is funny.

June 16, 2023

In prize-winning Israeli novelist/filmmaker Schiff's insightful commentary on postcolonial responsibility (his first novel to be translated to English), an Israeli professor learns that a merchant ship belonging to his grandfather's grandfather's grandfather has been discovered off the coast of an imaginary West African nation, so he travels there, hoping to reclaim his property and write a book. Never mind his proclaimed liberal stance, Professor Schiff is naively, reprehensibly blithe about his ancestor's having traded in enslaved people. (He was also horrified when a friend offered him his African maid in lieu of moneys owed but captivated enough by her to accept.) Once in West Africa, the professor is arrested under the fictitious country's Law for Adjudicating Slave Traders and Their Accomplices, Heirs, and Beneficiaries and makes things worse by unfolding his family's history, acknowledging that his ancestor was a criminal--"at least by today's standards"--but arguing for his noble intentions in striving to return to Africa families of the formerly enslaved, whom he's persuaded (forced?) to convert to Judaism. VERDICT Stumbling through his lawsuit while recalling troubles back home, the professor is met firmly by his accusers, who finally point out that "when a white European author writes about Africa, he is unwittingly reenacting an exploitative act." This might damn the author himself, but he is to be praised for taking the risk as he hones important questions with razor-sharp intensity.--Barbara Hoffert

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.