See Under: Love (Hebrew: Ayen Erekh: Ahavah) was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in 1986 and translated into English by Betsy Rosenberg in 1989 (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The novel is divided into four sections, each employing a radically different literary mode to approach the Holocaust — the event that dominates the lives of the protagonist’s family without ever being directly described or explained.
The first section, “Momik,” follows nine-year-old Shlomo (Momik) Neuman in 1950s Jerusalem. His parents and their friends are Holocaust survivors who never speak of what happened — the trauma manifests only in nightmares, silences, and inexplicable behaviors. Momik, desperate to understand “the Nazi Beast” his grandfather mutters about, attempts to summon it literally in his basement, hoping that by confronting it he can break its power over his family.
The second section, “Bruno,” reimagines the final days of Bruno Schulz — the Polish-Jewish writer murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942 — as a man transforming into a salmon, swimming upriver toward a sea where all stories converge. The third section, “Wasserman,” presents a Holocaust survivor forcing his story on a Nazi officer in an encyclopedia-entry format, where the entries are alphabetized fragments of a fantastical narrative. The fourth, “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life,” imagines the entire life of a child born and dying in a single day inside a concentration camp.
The novel’s formal experimentation is not decorative but necessary: Grossman argues implicitly that no single narrative mode can contain the Holocaust, that only a multiplicity of approaches — realistic, fantastic, encyclopedic, stream-of-consciousness — can approximate its reality.
Collecting See Under: Love
First edition English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1989): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30
- Hebrew first edition (1986): $50–$150