Hope: A Tragedy

In Hope: A Tragedy, Auslander has written his first novel.  The story of  Solomon Kugel, an eco-friendly-goods salesman, who excels at his job.  He moves his family, a wife and young son to a farmhouse in a rural town for a fresh start on life.

But Kugel is a worrier, and hypochondriac and things quickly begin to unravel.  His mother, who imagines herself a Holocaust victim moves in with them and though doctors have said she does
not have long to live, she seems to be thriving.  Kugel cannot seem to keep everyone satisfied, not the tenant who is renting the spare room to help make ends meet, his wife or his mother.

Then he finds a surprise in the attic.  When he hears mysterious tapping in the heating vents, he traces it to the attic.  There he finds a “hideous, horribly disfigured terribly old” woman typing on a computer.  She claims to be Anne Frank and she says she is writing her next book.
In some of the most humorous parts of the book Kugel tries to explain why he cannot throw
Anne Frank out of his attic even though his wife threatens to leave him if Anne stays.

Auslander tells us that the book is a story about history, both personal and cultural and our inability to escape it.  “Kugel”, he says, “the protagonist, is hopeful.  It’s his main character flaw.  He can’t help being hopeful, despite all he knows.  That, to me, is funny.”
But, says Auslander, “This isn’t a novel about the Holocaust.  It is about a guy living in Upstate
New York, trying to believe in a positive future.”

Kugel struggles with the idea of hope throughout the book.  He has been seeing therapist Professor Jove, who tells him, “it was knowing that there was a happier time, a place for joy and peace and security, that made the sudden absence of it all so agonizing...Not the agony of what was, but the agony of what was no longer: this was the source of life’s pain - not fear of a hell to come, but rather the knowledge of an Eden that was no more.  Hell isn’t the punishment, said Professor Jove, Eden was.”