Midnight Mendel by Eran Hollander

jewishbooksJuly 8, 2026Post a Comment

Translator: Yardenne Greenspan

High school senior Abigail never comes home from a delegation trip to Poland and disappears without a trace. When the police come up empty-handed, her older brother, a lothario evading the responsibilities of life, travels to Europe to go looking for her on his own. Taking on the role of private investigator, he embarks on a chaotic voyage of pleasure and destruction.

Midnight Mendel is a dark detective novel saturated with sex, drugs, and dark humor that pokes through Jewish history with cynical irreverence. Sketched with a crude line, family tragedies come to life, told through the eyes of a hedonistic bachelor nearing age thirty, who writes television skits and fantasizes about orgies and a European passport.

Moving through Tel Aviv, Berlin, and all over Poland, his search for his sister lands him among the sewers and sex workers of Eastern Europe, to extermination camps and old graveyards, and to sweet and sour memories of his Holocaust survivor grandparents. In a whirlwind of clues and conjectures, alcohol, films, tennis, and porn, the brother falls down a rabbit hole of corruption and impersonation, organized crime and classical music, while his investigation brings up disturbing questions about his closest family members.

Midnight Mendel picks apart Holocaust memory, forcing its protagonist to reexamine his identity as a persecuted Jew in the third millennium. It exposes an opportunistic, spoiled, and untethered generation that doesn’t want to remember nearly as much as it aches to forget. Through a documentary ruse, the protagonist cloaks himself in the author’s seemingly authentic family story. Toeing the line between truth and fiction, the missing sister and the Holocaust coalesce into a single mystery.

Eran Hollander is a theatre teacher and musician. Midnight Mendel is his debut novel. His second book, 17 Arlozorov Street, was published in Israel in 2026.

Year first published: 2026

Eran Hollander Yardenne Greenspan

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Order the book directly from the author. You never know what skills may come in handy. Knitting as a tool for deliverance? The more talent you or your muscle memory cultivates, the better. Particularly during wartime. As history shows, war can come at any time. After 80 years of relative peace in the lands of Europe and USA its inhabitants may feel that it is the natural order of things and war is only for faraway lands. Does not always feel like that nowadays. But I digress. The point is that being really good at one or more practical skills, like sewing, combined with creative thinking and diligent work, can save your life. Did I just spoil the end of The Secret Buttons by Ellen M. Shapiro, a novel for middle graders? I don’t think so. The title already hints at it, and anyone can guess that the book is a survivor’s story and not someone who was killed. Even the intro page makes sure we know what it is about. Lesson number one: Keep learning and keep getting better at what you do. 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Inspired by her mother’s memories of the Holocaust in Vienna and life in wartime England, The Secret Buttons is her first novel. The book’s page on the author’s website. The author is on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. The author just finished a 24-page study guide/slide […]
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These were the wounds they carried throughout their lives that caused trauma not just for themselves, but also for the people who loved them. And they transpired as intergenerational trauma to the main character, who did not know anything about her ancestors’ lives and inner conflicts. Neveretheless she inherited them and, because of her own integrity and intellectual curiosity, ended up confronting and dealing with them. The book gently suggests that it was inevitable. I am not sure, because a less integral person might have swept all these deep issues under the rug. But I agree that facing down the past is a brave and necessary act to live an honest and full life. Excavating what is hidden in one’s identity is a transformative experience. The depiction of choosing between willful ignorance and painful enlightenment is what I treasured most in the Dáil’s prose. The way she poses questions and unfolds layers of psyche through storytelling is exceptional. 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A Family Saga From Concentration Camp to Gold Mining Empire Editor: Juliette Lachemeier What is gold? On one hand, it is the very material and metaphor that represents wealth. On the other hand, it is also a symbol of spiritual redemption. Just think of the importance of the golden rule that exists in one form or another in many belief systems. In the olden days, gold symbolized divine purity and represented eternal value. We might be far from the times when these associations were almost universal, but many people still carry remnants of these beliefs even if unconsciously. And I haven’t even touched on how light is also associated with both gold and enlightenment. So, when you have a family in a novel that became rich through gold mine operations, it makes you think about why the author chose this particular option to make the fictional family rich. I want to think that it has to do with all of the above reasons. 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Do you believe humans are inherently benevolent or malevolent? And why do you believe one way or another? Does it even matter what you believe? It probably matters to you as you view the world and humans through your own specific lens, including your belief system. What if instead of believing, you had proof for a more science-based approach to that question, or at least to a subset of the issues springing from the answer? The ethical question of what constitutes good or evil is too generic. Let’s narrow the topic to how it is possible for people to commit acts that most of us, but not all, would consider immoral. The subtitle of Kriegman’s book–“Racism, Religious Hatred, Nationalism, Terrorism, and Genocide”– lists some of these and even gives a hint of the answer: “Evolutionary Biology.” It is not so much about the how, though, but the why. Spoiler: The central thesis of his book, the human capacity for mass violence is “deeply human” rather than inhuman and is the direct result of humans evolving from great apes who naturally organize into competitive groups using coordinated violence, with larger brains enabling the formation of extended identity groups based on religious and ideological beliefs. There are plenty of deeply human stories in the book, which is the layer I enjoyed the most. The authors’ personal memories, observations about humanity in general, and the myriad examples of violence. These I could relate to, evoked emotion and intellectual responses in me, and I highly recommend them on a personal level. The intellectual honesty he approaches the difficult question of holocausts (yes, in plural), is truly admirable. Another level is the scientific explanations and exploration of evolutionary biology and how it explains our capacity for violence. 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The tone is often critical and reflective, using irony and juxtaposition to underscore the paradoxes of belief and conflict. The prose is dense and layered, with frequent use of historical references, academic citations, and illustrative anecdotes. For me, a topic of interest in the book was religion as its perennial student. Kriegman had a lot to say about it, its relation to war, and it all boiled down to this: religion is not the root cause of war, but rather a culturally evolved tool that amplifies innate human tendencies toward group-based aggression. It is a provocative, intellectually charged argument that challenges conventional narratives by synthesizing evolutionary theory, political history, and cognitive science. Was I convinced of the claim’s validity? Mostly. More importantly, he gave me a lot to think about. I need to keep going back to check the details. By now, his conclusion feels reasonable, but I also want to fully understand it. 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Jewish Book World

Midnight Mendel by Eran Hollander

Translator: Yardenne Greenspan

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Midnight Mendel by Eran Hollander

Translator: Yardenne Greenspan

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