I wish I could have followed the story of Momik, a nine-year-old son of Holocaust survivors trying to make sense of the adults who have come to Israel from “Over There.” The first quarter of the book is the young boy’s stream of consciousness reactions to “the beast” that has tortured his parents and their neighbors. In the second quarter, Momik narrates the life of a Nazi persecuted writer. The third is about Momik’s grandfather and the fourth an encyclopedia. It is an interesting attempt to convert the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust into words, but the result for me was that while I remained totally intrigued by Grossman’s creation of scenes in 1950s Israel and 1940s “Over There” I couldn’t hang on. There wasn’t really a plot. I couldn’t always tell who was speaking. Some sentences ran for pages. Reluctantly, I gave up without finishing.