Hellman's Scrapbook

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

This novel opens with a mundane scene from a Jewish boy’s life, and
then proceeds to plummet downward in a vortex of misery, horror, and
fear. The reader is quickly at a loss as to what is happening when, who
is telling the story, and why the protagonist is where he is. With
masterful control, Majzels offers just enough information and continuity
to draw the reader in before switching story line and point of view.

Gradually we become aware that perhaps we are sharing in the
protagonist’s anguish of insanity. We begin the desperate effort of
attempting to gather the episodes of Hellman’s many lives into single
strands of causal narratives that make sense to us. In doing so we
compete with Hellman himself, thus furthering the duality of our
relationship to the protagonist. Do we trust him or not? Does he even
trust himself? Are we to immerse ourselves in him, or are we to distance
ourselves and scrutinize with suspicion his every move? The reader
finishes the novel having received no clear answers to these questions.


Hellman’s Scrapbook is set in a variety of places—some as concrete
as Room 303 in the Hochelaga Memorial Institute in Montreal, Quebec;
others as vague as jungle, possibly in Manila, a concentration camp in
Poland, and the building site of a pyramid in Cairo. Whatever the
setting, Hellman is always cast as the victim. The question that lingers
at the end of the novel is whether such victimization is self-imposed,
or whether it is a statement of fact about a world that is becoming
increasingly fragmented, alien, and brutal. Has the generic Everyman of
our expectations become a Hellman?