A Play for the End of the World by Jai Chakrabarti
Jai Chakrabarti’s impressive debut novel, ‘A Play for The End of the World’ speaks to the power of art and literature to console and give strength. Taking place over decades and set in Bengal, Warsaw, and NYC, Chakrabarti’s finely drawn characters reveal his understanding of guilt’s heavy burden. The book would have benefitted from a narrower scope. Nonetheless, Chakrabarti evocatively speaks of existential themes that transcend ethnicities and religions.
The prologue’s date is July 18, 1942—the place: an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto. True to history, Dr. Janusz Korczak (Pan Doktor), a Polish-Jewish educator, staged a play casting orphans as the actors. The play Dak Ghar (translated as The Post Office) was written in 1911 by Indian Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. The play’s plot revolves around a dying child who is quarantined. He experiences life by living imaginatively, a perfect topic for the Warsaw ghetto.
In Part 1 of the novel, we meet Jaryk Smith. The year is 1972, and Jaryk has left his girlfriend Lucy in NYC to travel to Calcutta, India, where his best friend Misha has died under mysterious circumstances. Misha and Jaryk were friends when they were children in the Warsaw ghetto. It was before the Nazi’s horrific deportations began that Jaryk was assigned the lead role in Tagore’s play Dak Ghar. Soon after, Jaryk escapes the death train traveling to Treblinka. After a few years, he makes his way to New York City.
Over the next three decades, he cobbles together a life making money as a bookkeeper at a synagogue. He often spent time with his old friend Misha. Jaryk is plagued by guilt, knowing that the Pan Doktor and the other orphans perished at Treblinka. Given his guilt and self-loathing that he escaped, his ability to sustain a relationship with his girlfriend is in doubt. “What he’d wanted to tell her-what he hoped she now understood-was that he’d left his only family, everything he loved in this world” when he jumped off that train. He is not sure he can psychologically recover from all he experienced.
His gratitude to Pan Doktor for staging the play during the cruel circumstance has stayed with him. He says, “I remember what that play did for us. It made our days bearable, all that ghetto heat, all that feeling that reminded us just how unloved we were any time we stepped a foot from Pan Doktor’s house. We knew we were meant for death.”
While in eastern India, Jaryk learns that the local politics are turning violent and ‘Dak Ghar’ will be performed again. He slowly comes to terms with his choice so long ago and allows himself to feel the power of love and even a shred of hope. Chakrabarti’s ambitious novel reminds us that telling stories can redeem and heal us all. 4.5/5