The Museum Guard

Norman Ravvin is an assistant professor of English at the University of
New Brunswick. He is the author of Café des Westens, Sex, Skyscrapers,
and Standard Yiddish, and A House of Words.

The Museum Guard is a lightly comic treatment of very dark themes. The
men and women who inhabit Norman’s pre–World War II Halifax are a
collection of eccentrics—museum guards, curators, hotel bellhops, and
a young woman with no past who takes care of the city’s Jewish
cemetery. Their entanglements are humorous, but the outcome of their
actions is distinctly unsettling as they get swept up in the oncoming
war.

Norman has created an ingenious plot that take his characters from
Halifax, where little seems to happen, to Amsterdam, where much too much
is happening for anyone’s liking. In Amsterdam, the Canadians become
involved in the unfortunate life of a Dutch painter; as well, they are
forced to grapple with their naiveté in the face of Hitler’s war.

The book’s themes of artistic yearning, personal heartbreak, and the
power of historical circumstance are drawn together in haunting and
surprising ways. One might only quibble that in a book that is partly
about the fate of Jews at the outbreak of the Holocaust, the Jewish
characters might be too lightly sketched, symbolic stand-ins for victims
of history rather than fully recognizable modern men and women.

Nevertheless, The Museum Guard is a novel that can be read with an odd
mixture of pleasure and unease at the events described.