L ifestyle /C ulture
Books: Palatable Pandemic, Familiar Face Returns
“Our Country Friends”
Makes Pandemic
Palatable SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
“Our Country Friends”
Gary Shteyngart
Penguin Random House
FOR GARY SHTEYNGART,
who wrote about the painful
adult consequences of his
botched circumcision in the
Oct. 4 issue of The New Yorker,
no issue seems to be off-the-
table when it comes to writing
topics. Shteyngart’s new novel “Our
Country Friends,” published on
Nov. 2, is no exception, taking
the hairy milieu of 2020 — the
pandemic, the June Black Lives
Matter protests and cancel
culture, whose proximity
to current times may make
readers squirm — and turning
it into a refreshing, hopeful, yet
crushing, narrative.

Sasha Senderovsky, an aloof
and past-prime professor and
writer, is the landowner of a
“bungalow colony,” in upstate
New York, his dilapidated
18 NOVEMBER 11, 2021
property dotted with felled
branches after early-spring
storms. At the onset of the
pandemic, he’s joined by a
flock of hand-picked guests,
many of whom Senderovsky
has known since high school:
the CEO of a popular dating
app site; an adjunct professor-
turned-short-order cook with
a chunk of lung missing thanks
to a run-in with lung cancer; a
former student who catches the
eye of many of the “colonists”;
a friendly rival whose world-
liness and culinary aptitude
are both charming and
overrated; the unnamed Actor
who is haughty and laughably
self-serious. While Senderovsky tries
to escape with his guests, his
anxiety continues to bubble
as he manages financial woes,
a house in disrepair and a
growing paranoia of white
supremacists learning of his
Soviet Jewish identity, as well
as the Korean, Gujarati and
Turkish identities of his guests.

By the wayside falls his wife
Masha, a psychiatrist whose
patients include geriatric
COVID-denying, Soviet Jewish
conspiracists and, not formally,
hers and Senderovsky’s 8-year-
old Nat, née Natasha, who is
herself grappling with who she
is during the pandemic, with
only her love of Korean boy
band BTS seeming to remain
static. Sheyngart projects his own
Ashkenazi sensibilities onto
Senderovksy — both Sheyngart
and his protagonist hail from
Leningrad, both born in 1972.

But while Shteyngart has
enough pop culture savviness
to pump the book chock-full
of allusions, Senderovsky fails
to connect with his fellow
bungalow colonists with his
head-scratching references to
JEWISH EXPONENT
Russian literature.

Within the bungalow
colony’s own isolated habitat,
Senderovsky is his own island.

“Our Country Friends” is
a nod to the collective disori-
entation felt by Americans
at the start of that spring.

Masha policed guests about
maintaining distancing,
masking and militantly
wearing blue latex gloves.

Guests sat coldly outside for
dinners, chairs dragged the
appropriate distance from
one another.

Shteyngart likes to whisper
at his readers through cracks
in the fourth wall, drawing our
attention to an em-dash and
why he’s decided to use it. He
knows his writing hits a little
too close to home and uses it as
an excuse to usher in generous
familiarity and intimacy
with us.

And it’s difficult to resist
Shteyngart’s romantic, but
realistic, portrayal of last year,
especially when scenes from
an isolated and bucolic upstate
New York are replicated in
Philadelphia and across the
country. Forests of “Black Lives
Matter” and “Hate Has No
Home Here” signs line up
on one side of the streets in
Senderovsky’s sprawling
neighborhood, with “All Lives
Matter” signs and black-
and-white-and-blue-striped American flags lining the
other. Mysterious black vans
with xenophobic iconog-
raphy disappear and reappear,
their presence threatening
the delicate homeostasis the
colonists have worked hard to
maintain. A trip to the countryside
to escape the virus was still
not immune to its deep social
impacts. Nightly elaborate
Mediterranean feasts and
copious imbibing gave way to a
host of salacious affairs, secrets,
nightmares and sickness.

Nat worries that she is a
member of “Generation L” —
the “L” is for “last” — as the
climate crisis comes to a head,
but the guests seem to sober
as they realize they may all
be of this generation, regard-
less of the 40-plus-year age gap
among them.

Even the cultural elite must
reckon with their decision to
escape up the Hudson River
while those in the city continue
to die. They have guilt for
leaving, guilt for living.

Shteyngart is ambitious in
his novel. He takes such a distal
locale and group of people and
makes them feel so close to the
reader. But even more impres-
sive is Shteyngart’s ability to
tackle a national conversation
that not only began in the
not-so-distant-past, but that is
also ongoing, and to do so with
wit, tenderness and honesty.

After 19 months of shrug-
ging off COVID-related media,
dismissing it as trite, overdone
or just plain painful to see,
readers can now hopefully find
solace in confronting the totally
bizarre, still not-quite-normal,
experience of enduring a global
pandemic, if only in the pages
of “Our Country Friends.”
srogelberg@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0741
Gabriel Allon Does
Gabriel Allon-like
Things ANDY GOTLIEB | JE MANAGING EDITOR
“The Cellist”
Daniel Silva
HarperCollins Israeli intelligence officer/art
restorer Gabriel Allon is back
—and anyone who’s ever read
one of Daniel Silva’s books
knows what that means.

Bad guys (often Arabs
and, increasingly, Russians).

Duplicity. Action sequences.

See Books, Page 20
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Courtesy of Penguin Random House
B OOKS



L IFESTYLE /C ULTURE
‘Camp Confi dential’ Asks If Ends Justify Means
T E L EVISION
SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
WHEN ARNO MAYER joined
the Army in 1944 aft er fl eeing
France from Nazi clutches, he
expected to exact revenge on the
regime later responsible for the
genocide of his Jewish family.

Riding on a bus with other
trepidation-fi lled young Jewish
soldiers, Mayer braced himself
to arrive at an airfi eld, to be
shipped to Europe to fi ght
battles against the Nazis in the
waning war.

Instead, Mayer, with a
select group of other German-
speaking soldiers, were taken
to a place their superiors called
“nothing”: a place hidden from
sight and from the world.

“Nothing” was really
a clearing in the woods, a
military base masquerading as a
summer camp, complete with a
swimming pool and ping-pong
table. It was known as
PO Box 1142.

Shortly aft er the arrival of
Mayer and his peers, a group
of German offi cers, many with
Nazi affi liations and including
the ranks of rocket scientist
Wernher von Braun, arrived as
prisoners of war. Th e soldiers
were instructed fi rst to interro-
gate, but then to simply keep the
Th ird Reich soldiers happy; they
would serve an important role in
the World War II victory.

Nearly all camp archives were
destroyed along with its campus
in 1946, but the oral histories of
the participating soldiers were
preserved and are now available
to discover in the quasi-an-
imated documentary short
“Camp Confi dential: America’s
Secret Nazis,” now streaming on
Netfl ix.

Israel-based fi lmmaker Mor
Loushy remembers hearing
the 2006 National Park Service
archival tapes from PO Box
1142 offi cers for the fi rst time in
2019 when she was approached
by producers Benjamin and
Jono Bergmann to help direct
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM the documentary with partner
Daniel Sivan.

“It was pretty chilling,”
Loushy said.

Loushy recounts one of the
fi rst tapes she heard, which is
featured in the fi lm: Around
Christmastime, the soldiers were
asked by superiors to take the
German offi cers to a department
store to buy holiday presents for
their families in Germany.

Th e offi cers almost unani-
mously decided to buy skimpy
undergarments for their wives
with their $1,000 budget.

But beyond their roles of
glorifi ed babysitters, the “morale
offi cers” at PO Box 1142 had
an even more sinister task.

Th eir spoiling of the German
offi cers was a gentle prodding
for valuable information on the
country’s V-2 rocket production.

“Th ey were already preparing
for the Cold War, even before
the world understood it,” Loushy
said. In exchange for their intel, the
German offi cers were promised
naturalization for them and
their families and immunity
from war crime charges.

“Camp Confi dential” asks
the audience less to make a
judgment call on whether the
young Jewish soldiers made the
right decision in succumbing
to help in the furtive military
agenda and more to question if
PO Box 1142 was a justifi able
operation in the fi rst place.

“It goes back to the question
of whether you can do bad things
to achieve good ends,” said Peter
Weiss, another Jewish soldier, in
the fi lm. “And I would say that
if you do that, then the end that
you achieve is not worthwhile.”
Mayer and Weiss aside, many
morale offi cers took the classi-
fi ed information of PO Box 1142
to their graves. Mayer and Weiss
were even hesitant to share their
experiences on fi lm, nearly 75
years aft er their time at the
camp. “Most of them didn’t tell the
[experience in PO Box 1142]
to their wives, their kids, their
families,” Loushy said. “Th ey
kept it a secret. It was very diffi -
cult for them.”
The documentary, which
began production pre-pan-
demic in 2019, was released at
an opportune time, Loushy said.

Th ough PO Box 1142 was opera-
tional three-fourths of a century
ago, its newly-learned existence
prompts the fi lm’s audience to
question what is happening in
their own countries; what secrets
are still being kept?
Loushy believed “Camp
Confi dential” is deeply relevant.

“Th is message was really
universal,” Loushy said. “Even
today, I think, you know, the U.S.

and so many other countries are
cooperating with dark regimes.

To what extent are you willing
to cooperate and to do unethical
Arno Mayer, a Jewish Holocaust refugee, joined the Army in 1944,
expecting to exact revenge on Nazi forces.

Courtesy of Netfl ix
and immoral things in order to
achieve good things?”
“Camp Confi dential” adds
to the conversation about what
“Never Again” truly means.

If valuable information
about WWII, the Holocaust and
American Jews’ role in the war
is still being unveiled, how will
we choose to respond “in order
to make a better society and
to not repeat the crimes that
happened in history, to learn
something from our history?”
Loushy wondered. ●
srogelberg@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0741
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