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The English Disease The English Disease by Joseph Skibell Algonquin, 2003 256 pp; $23.95

Shroud Shroud by John Banville Knopf, 2003 257 pp.; $25

Imagine that you're a chronically unhappy Jewish man, the grandson of Holocaust victims, married to a Gentile woman who both enchants and confounds you. When an obnoxious colleague invites you to take a "dour pilgrimage" with him to Auschwitz, you accept because you think there'll be others on this journey—important scholars in your own field of musicology. Instead you find yourself alone in Poland with the most annoying man alive, retracing the steps of your dead relatives.

"Traveling with Leibowitz," says Charles Belski, hero of The English Disease,

is like traveling with a child whose mother has neglected to pack his Ritalin. I've been with him barely twelve minutes and already I'm exhausted. He has literally not stopped talking since I arrived, encyclopedically rehashing every detail of his trip from the minute he left his adoring wife on their doorstep in Sebastopol to the moment he met me at the gate, wearing a seersucker suit and a white straw hat identical to mine.

Belski's compassion runs as deep as his melancholy (the "English disease"). Few people could pity a blathering narcissist like Leibowitz, but Belski sees him as "a victim of his own unfortunate personality," and for quite a few pages tolerates Leibowitz's brilliantly weird discourses on Wagner and Jung, Herzl and Hitler, until finally even he has had enough and tries to escape. He ducks out of their hotel room while Leibowitz is in the bathroom, only to meet up with the inexorable idiot again in a synagogue in the old Warsaw Ghetto: "Aha! I thought I'd find you here," says Leibowitz. "I do so apologize. I hadn't realized how very long I was taking."

At dinner that night as "bits of kielbasa entangle in his beard or land on the serving platters," Leibowitz launches into another grand lecture, tracing Jewish man's "path towards assimilation" by way of the Marx brothers and their linguistic prowess. He labels silent Harpo "the ultimate alien," the Hasidic Jew in his big coat and hat "denied a language of his own." Chico, with his halting English, represents Jewish man's first steps toward assimilation with the Gentile world. Last comes Groucho, who "masters the master's tongue" and then uses it as a weapon against his own cartoonishly over-drawn Jewishness.

"And what about Zeppo?" says Belski.

"Zeppo," says Leibowitz, "is so assimilated that ultimately, like most Jews, Belski—well, like you yourself, for instance, with your blonde shiksa wife and your goyishe daughter—he eventually leaves the act altogether!"

This is the defining moment of the book. In the next chapter ("Zeppo in Auschwitz"), Belski marches his completely assimilated but sad and guilt-absorbed self into the symbolic center of the Holocaust. Walking among depressing concentration-camp displays, he feels detached: "the actual exhibits—the mountains of human hair, the tall alps of shoes and eyeglasses, the long dunes of luggage—all seem less powerful and disturbing than their familiar photographs." Yes, this is a terrible place, but what does it have to do with him? Why should he have to own the suffering imposed upon his people by outsiders?

Detachment doesn't come easy to Belski, though, and it's not long before his resistance falters. Returning to the States, he knows that he must claim his Jewish identity—at least, as much of it as he can claim without giving up religious skepticism. What follows is the hilarious quest of Belski's wife, who, knowing that he wants her to convert and feeling disgusted at his lack of zeal, drags him backward along the path of Jewish assimilation.

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