The Last Tower to Heaven

<p>Days before his thirty-third birthday Jacob Paul an ordinary New Yorker learns that his life is the dream of a man being slowly gassed in the back of a box truck headed from the Chelmno extermination camp to a mass grave in the Polish woods. And thus begins a 500-page 18-years-long Quixotic often comic picaresque. J’s adventures lead him to Chase his fellow traveler and love interest and to Art Chase’s husband the evangelical governor of Mexico who enlists J to build a new kind of Holocaust museum next to the Creationist Museum outside Cincinnati a Holocaust museum that Art and his evangelical backers hope will finally show Jews as they really were. Yid World which ends up being a Lithuanian-shtetl theme park is obviously a failure as seemingly are all of J's attempts to connect to his awesome and awful legacy until finally J embarks on one last epic attempt to build the means by which to confront his dreamer. <em>Last Tower to Heaven </em>grapples with what it means to derive agency and identity from collective trauma with what it means to be at once a dream of the Holocaust and yet messily alive in our world. Ultimately that struggle forces J to learn how to build a story out of love for his love.Days before his thirty-third birthday Jacob Paul an ordinary New Yorker learns that his life is the dream of a man being slowly gassed in the back of a box truck headed from the Chelmno extermination camp to a mass grave in the Polish woods. And thus begins a 500-page 18-years-long Quixotic often comic picaresque. J’s adventures lead him to Chase his fellow traveler and love interest and to Art Chase’s husband the evangelical governor of Mexico who enlists J to build a new kind of Holocaust museum next to the Creationist Museum outside Cincinnati a Holocaust museum that Art and his evangelical backers hope will finally show Jews as they really were. Yid World which ends up being a Lithuanian-shtetl theme park is obviously a failure as seemingly are all of J's attempts to connect to his awesome and awful legacy until finally J embarks on one last epic attempt to build the means by which to confront his dreamer. <em>Last Tower to Heaven </em>grapples with what it means to derive agency and identity from collective trauma with what it means to be at once a dream of the Holocaust and yet messily alive in our world. Ultimately that struggle forces J to learn how to build a story out of love for his love.</p>