The Requisitions: A Novel, An offering
Spoiler free intrigue peppered with personal anecdotes.
I’m not in the business of reviews or criticism, but it is a great joy of mine to try to convince people to engage with the art that moves me.
published his second novel “The Requisitions” and I was among the lucky ones to purchase a copy from the first 300 prints. I will offer this to you with my personal bias and work experience on the table; This novel is my favorite movie of the year.Above: Photo by - a main editor of The Requisitions and head of the publishing imprint “Kingdom Anywhere” with Samuel.
Samuel is a master of multiple mediums, and holds one of his two Masters Degrees in Holocaust studies. The first day I met him, it was just over a year after I finished a huge research project that evolved into writing a Pilot for an original mini-series set in a concentration camp. About 3 minutes into our first exchange we found ourselves leaning closer over a trusted table at Au Chat Noir to check if we heard each other right... In fact we do share a huge creative pull to tell stories from this harrowing time and place. In fact our addiction to philosophy and storytelling did lead us both into Nazi-infested worlds, where the exploration of ethics, responsibility, and resistance is endless. In fact he was working on this novel that very day.
I ought to speak for myself, but I think many readers assume an author is always a part of the story. Auto-fiction is a rapidly growing subset of independent cinema, almost to the point of no return. The virus-like fascination with celebrity culture is spreading beyond just movie stars, with executives asking me point blank in pitch meetings how much of the character’s trauma in my scripts are my own, and there is a lingering tension that if I do not answer in the affirmative that I am not the person to tell the story. I have some inherent resistance to this, perhaps more accurately labeled as pride. I am a writer. I am an actor. Fiction is the game we play. What does it matter how much of me is in there? Do you think I can only tell my own stories?
Samuel may not have this issue of pride that I have, he is a better man than me in many ways, but presupposing he has confronted this thought before, he seems to have doubled down with an interesting take. He has placed a modern day version of hisself throughout the book. The concept of historical fiction is one I had just danced with in my pilot, but Samuel created a historical metafiction.
The Requisitions weaves between three points of view in early 1940s Poland, with a fourth character being the author himself in the 2020s. It has poetic license and a fictional filter, but the starkness of the fourth POV is a surprising structural element. It reminds me of the NYT game “Connections” where sometimes three of the tiles are so clearly fitting and the fourth is where the game begins.
It reads to me as a charming bet against the “author always writes hisself” at the very least least but, upon deeper reflection, I find it to be a vulnerable act of humility and a bold claim of responsibility to get ahead of anyone asking why this young non-jewish man of the 2020s ought to enter the canon of Holocaust fiction.
The answer to that is within every page of the modern chapter and reflected in the intimate and accurate representation of the historical bulk of the book. We also are gifted an author who answers directly for himself about what the fuck he is doing here. Fear not, Samuel doesn’t linger in the modern chapters on that explanation. I imagine if he had, it would read defensive. Instead, he takes the reader through a narrative of his own as his mother enters a new phase of her late years in life and they both have to reconcile with memory, mortality, and meaning.
These themes of course haunt all three of the war-torn protagonists in their varied and horrifying fates in and around Łódź, Poland. Viktor Bauman is a professor with two Jewish grandmothers that he did not know, condemned to the target class on two accounts; Intellectual and capital J-Jew. Elsa Dietrich is an Aryan beauty who is forced into a relationship with one Nazi and a Secretary job for another. Carl Becker is the SS officer who has claimed Elsa for himself, but spends much of his time yearning for her whilst on duty. The three characters have vastly different places in the hierarchy of the collapsing city, but none are painless, and none are expected.
I will admit, I was concerned before reading that Samuel’s intricate academic knowledge of the Holocaust would constrain his narrative freedom. I have certainly stood in my own way with a “good student” commitment to facts, logic, and history. Not to say that a moment of the book felt outside of those elements, but only to compliment his brazen willingness to enter the emotional and sensory experience of all three of these characters. In doing so, he demands an intense consideration from the readers about what may seem as obvious ethical choices. Does a small act of resistance absolve an SS employee? What about a big one? How do we feel about the young, drugged up farmers who were drafted to the German front line? How about the Jews running the Ghetto’s, serving down Nazi orders? Thought experiment after thought experiment is posed in each scene, challenging the audience to reflect on questions they thought they knew the answers to.
“But what remains of ‘The Professor’ on this day of days? Was it not an illusion all along? Viktor glares at his reflection. What was he trying to prove all those years? What use is philosophy in the face of death squads?”
The Requisitions, page 29
Now, why do I call this my favorite movie of the year? The prose finds an incredibly difficult balance of political quandaries and historical devotion through a character-first emotional story. The writing engages all of the senses, down to a continuous quasi-surreal stomach ache that I won’t spoil, but will tell you I felt inside my modern American guts. You can smell this book from a mile away, there are select suspense scenes that would fill a movie-salle with palpable tension, and when I tell you I could feel the light change as the book went on… I’m going to request that you believe me and give Samuel the credit. We also have a reverence for music and other literature in here, which often books will stray away from doing unless it is a major plot point. You can hear what they hear from start to finish. These people are in an incredibly specific world and time, and like any good film, the details paint the picture so that you know exactly where and when that is.
There is a strategy in film production to adapt “bad books,” because you save yourself from disappointing a fan base who is attached to the vision in their heads. Because authors are often focused on the word and character and leave out the production design and lighting unless they can spin it into a pointed poetic turn of phrase. Because movie executives are afraid.
I hate this strategy, but I understand it, especially as a lover of literature. Some things are meant to be books and not go off the page. Samuel defies this with his masterful work. I both have watched it by reading, and hope to watch it one day in the cinema so that I can read it again. If I were tasked to adapt it, all I would have to do would be follow his directions.
You can read about the writing process HERE, before or after you read the novel. I imagine it will inspire you through his endurance and trust that he had something to say and had to say it.
You can purchase the book here, I would love to hear what you think.
Wow. My cheeks are red. I cannot WAIT to drink a bottle of wine on a terrace and discuss how we might make this book into a film.