Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy

by Gary Barwin

A middle-aged Jewish man who fantasizes about being a cowboy goes on an eccentric quest across Europe after the 1941 Nazi invasion of Lithuania in this wild and witty yet heartrending novel from the bestselling author of Yiddish for Pirates , shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Motl is middle-aged, poor, nerdy, Jewish and in desperate need of a shave. Since having his balls shot cleanly off as a youth in WWI, he's lived a quiet life at home in Vilnius with his shrewd and shrewish mom, Gitl, losing himself in the masculine fantasy world of cowboy novels by writers like Karl May--novels equally loved by Hitler, whose troops have just invaded Lithuania and are out to exterminate people like Motl. In his dreams, Motl is a fast-talking, rugged, expert gunslinger capable of dealing with the Nazi threat. But only in his dreams.

As friends and neighbours are killed around them, Motl and Gitl escape from Vilnius, saving their own skins. But they immediately risk everything to try rescue relatives they hope are still alive. With death all around him, Motl decides that a Jew's best revenge is not only to live, but to procreate. In order to achieve this, though, he must relocate those most crucial pieces of his anatomy lost to him in a glacier in the Swiss Alps in the previous war. It's an absurd yet life-affirming mission, made even more urgent when he's separated from his mother, and isn't sure whether she's alive or dead. Joining forces, and eventually hearts, with Esther, a Jewish woman whose family has been killed, Motl ventures across Europe, a kaleidoscope of narrow escapes and close encounters with everyone from Himmler, to circus performers, double agents, quislings, fake "Indians" and real ones. Motl at last figures out that he has more connection to the Indigenous characters in western novels than the cowboys.

An imaginative and deeply felt exploration of genocide, persecution, colonialism and masculinity--saturated in Gary Barwin's sharp wit and perfect pun-play-- Nothing the Same, Everything The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy is a one-of-a-kind novel of sheer genius.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Humor, Jewish, Canada, Historical, Book Club

344 pages, Hardcover

First published March 9, 2021

About the author

GARY BARWIN is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist and the author of 21 books of poetry, fiction and books for children. His bestselling novel [Book: Yiddish for Pirates] won the 2017 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and was a Governor General’s Award and Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist and has recently been longlisted for the Leacock Medal. His latest poetry collection is No TV for Woodpeckers His work has appeared widely in journals, including Poetry (Chicago), The Walrus and the Paris Review blog. A finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Poetry), he is a three-time recipient of Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year, and has also received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature. He is was Writer-in-Residence at Western University and the London Public Library and is currently Art Forms Writer-in-residence for at-risk youth and will be Writer-in Residence at McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library in 2017-2018. Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nazis steal who you are, turn you to what their Zyklon eyes desire so their balls shudder with righteous loathing, their tongues coil in intoxicated revulsion. Most of their victims become wraiths haunted by memories of what was, if they can remember, and what could have been.

I was rather enchanted by Gary Barwin’s previous novel — Yiddish for Pirates — and his latest, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, returns to familiar ground: Once more tracing the improbable adventures of a Jewish man with punning wordplay, Borscht Belt groaners, and the inkiest of black humour. While the earlier novel tells a swashbuckling tale (as narrated by a parrot, no less), this time we’re set in the jaws of the Holocaust as our hero, the middle-aged Motl, fancies himself a cowboy like the heroes in his paperback Westerns, riding off into the sunset, one step ahead of the Nazis even as he gallops towards them. There’s nothing funny about the real horrors that Motl witnesses — the jokes are the powerful coping mechanism of a powerless people — and as the adventure progresses, Motl is forced to consider whether his spurs and six-gun fantasies put him on the wrong side of the Cowboys vs Indians mythos. Once again, I find myself enchanted by Barwin’s writing and am moved by his use of humour to reconfigure ugly historical fact; you can laugh or you can cry, boychik. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Motl. Citizen of Vilna. Saddlebag of pain. Feedbag of Regret. At forty-five, he had a history. As a Lithuanian Jew, he was pickled in it. But though neither he nor his mother knew it at the time, something had changed. Somewhere, deep down in the overworked mine shaft of his imagination, it had been determined that he would set out on a perilous adventure, this time of his own choosing. He would get up on his horse and ride. And he would have a child. At his age. And avoid being killed. Sometimes you have to save your own bacon, when you’re a Jew.

Due to events he experienced during WWI (oh, the poor Penelopes, the frozen plums, those lost and hairy grails), Motl is compelled to find his way to Switzerland just as the Nazis are starting to round up his neighbours, so he hitches his ol’ hoss (the bull-headed Theodor Herzl) to his wagon, deposits his kvetching mamaleh (Gitl the Destroyer) on the seat beside himself, and sets out for “the lonesome hinterland of Lithuania and the uncertain southeastern border”. Nearly immediately, the quest is sidetracked by efforts to find or save this or that relative, and as the adventure progresses, Motl’s tale is one of narrow escapes, improbable coincidences, and selfless strangers (but isn’t that how every survivor story reads looking back?)

The history of Jews and Indigenous people, a picaresque, a cowboy shoot-’em-up, an adventure tale. One narrow escape after another. One damn unbelievable thing after another. Apparently, this would be another. Two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for supper. This, also, was the woolly history of Jews and the Indigenous. Except the sheep has a gun. But so do the wolves.

I don’t know if it’s only because I read an ARC, but the following (attributed to Hitler) is quoted twice in this book: Why should Germans worry that the soil that made their bread was won by the sword? When we eat wheat from Canada, do we think of murdered Indians? And this equivalence between a judenrein Germany and a “clearing” of the North American Plains seems to be the real crux of this book (apparently the Métis author Cherie Dimaline once quipped in reference to herself and Barwin, “we’re genocide buddies”). And that’s really something to think about: when Hitler makes the equivalence between his murderous efforts and your own country’s bloody founding, maybe your ancestors aren't left unstained. The final section of the book becomes a bit more overt (and less entertaining overall), but I still think that this book presents an important, even urgent, concept to bring into the public forum: We’re quick to recognise the Holocaust as an act of genocide but we continue to think of the cowboys as the good guys who brought order to the Wild West. What an imagination Barwin has, to write this Ballad of Motl the Cowboy; to make it entertaining in the midst of a Holocaust escape, and to make it perfectly relevant to the issues of today.

[Sherry · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 I have some mixed feelings about this.

“Sometimes it’s better to just let history be a heap of fragments. Best not to connect the dots, instead let it be one damn thing after another, a tragic picturesque.”

A quote from the book that summarizes perfectly what the experience was like reading this. Motl, a Jewish middle aged man living in Lithuania at the time when the Nazi’s invaded sets out on a quest to recover his testicles (I kid you not) that were shot off and left on a glacier in Switzerland in the First World War. What follows is a nightmare journey as he encounters a good deal of people displaced and in the worst situations possible as Nazi’s, and sadly Lithuanian’s, set about ridding themselves of ‘the Jewish problem’. These parts of the book are so beautifully and heartbreakingly written, that as I was recounting to my daughter a particular scene, I was in tears. When the story is focused on those things, the prose is sparing and it’s all the more impactful for being so. I’m sure there are parts of this book that will continue to haunt me.

But there were things that I struggled with. Partly, it was the structure. The book is written like stories being recounted, as though someone is just telling their memory to you. This serves the story, in that it is literally Motl sharing his memories and the memories of others, but it makes the narrative feel choppy and chaotic. Motl has a good deal of snappy one liners that after a while got to be a chore and also contributed to him and other characters not feeling fully fleshed out. There was a distance between what was happening and how the characters felt. Being that I’m very much a character driven reader this was a weakness for me. Though Motl was what could be termed a character with his humour and quirkiness, he never truly felt fully fleshed out to me.

About 2/3s of the way, the book kind of comes off the tracks and gets pretty bizarre. It’s at this point of the narrative where the author tries to connect what was happening to the Jews to what happened to the Indigenous people. I think, partly why it didn’t work for me is that there was just so much going on that the added concept was just too much. I understand the reasoning and the concept he was going for but by that point the whole cowboy thing was just feeling really overdone, something I’m a little sad about because that is what drew me to the book in the first place. Added to that, the story gets pretty strange, so that last 30% felt long and I was feeling that impatience I feel to be done when I’m not fully engaged with a book. So while there were elements to the story that didn’t quite work for me I’m still glad I read this. It seems the word Nazi gets thrown around a lot for what seems the most trivial things. Books like this are so important.

[Marsha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some will read this just for Barwin's signature wordplay and humour, but so much more than that has been layered into this quixotic Holocaust cowboy tale. This is a searing commentary on how genocide repeats itself. Disturbing and brilliant.

[Tori DiGregorio]

I DNF'd this but I got 80% through so i'm marking it at read idgaf.

[Michael Emmons · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️1/2

[Ash Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty confusing to follow at the beginning, what is real and what isn't? That's probably the point.

Super enjoyable in a grim sort of a way.

Loved the ending 👌

[Krista Dollimore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the most uniquely written books I’ve ever read about WW11

The interweaving of the western genre with ww11, the drawing of parallels between the Jewish experience in Germany and the indigenous people of Canada was very powerful. Barwins satirical writing packs a strong punch. There were paragraphs that I had to stop and re-read because they were so horrifying and wrapped inside the dark humour of his writing style.

This book will break your heart over and over, and it will do it, in a bizarrely comical way due to the nature of Motl and Esther . In that no matter how terrifying and impossible and tragic the situations they find themselves in are they are always cracking dark jokes, and somehow still go on.

I didn’t fully connect with Barwin’s writing style. It is very well done, but just for me, didn’t fully captivate me. But it didn’t matter because his story did. It was interesting, and powerful , and captures the absolute hell that is war and leaves you wanting to cry that these things actually happened. And it makes you want to get down on your knees and ask how is this possible. How could this have been done. It’s definitely worth picking up and joining Motl on his journey .

[Penn Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gary Barwin's Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy is a master work, hovering between tragedy and the humour (puns galore!) Barwin brings to all his work… very like Indigenous writing in that good regard! The novel reads like Salmon Rushdie at his best in its exuberant inclusivity… but the writing is so much tauter than Rushdie's rush, and it never totters. Nor does it falter in its quixotic but sure dash toward safety, somewhere, surely! My only quibble is the title, Nothing the Same, which does not invite the reader in. But begin at high noon, as Motl might suggest, and you will be still reading long into the night, impelled by plot and even more by language to conclude. A picaresque triumph.

[Emmeline Webb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read Don Quixote but this was definitely Quixotic. Bizarre mixed with realism, incredibly clever wordplay and one-liners mixed with horror and tragedy. This book is very funny and very very sad. An off-kilter meandering tale of genocide and the inheritability of grief. Plus what does the waiter say...

Also HAMILTON MENTIONED 💯💯

[Sayo -bibliotequeish- · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm having a tough time with this review.
As a whole I enjoyed this book, but there were some parts of the story that kind of lost me, I'm not sure if it was the writing or story related.
Spanning over many years we follow Motl from youth to old man, the majority of the story taking place as a middle aged man during WWII. Traversing across Europe first with his mother, then with Esther, and the people they meets and situations they get into.

I will say this is unlike an WWII book I have ever read.

[Bonnie Lendrum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through the years, there are books I have wanted to reread but haven’t yet. However, two new launches this spring, Constant Nobody and Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted, made me snap to attention. These were books to be reread immediately. They’re both historical fiction, and each one had me sitting bolt upright in bed.

Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl The Cowboy, by Gary Barwin, could be the whimsical tale of a middle-aged wanna-be-cowboy who has lost his testicles, but it’s not. And while there is more than a dash of caprice to the story, the backdrop is horror exercised over decades.

Motl, our gunslinging hero who has spent more time with his nose in Westerns than in paid livelihood, finds his métier when the Nazis invade his Lithuanian village. He leaves town with his ‘hoss’ hitched to a wagon and his mother sitting by his side. In time, he loses both, but he gains Esther. She too has lost her family to the Nazis. Their escape becomes a quest to find his testicles, leave Europe and begin a family.  

Between hair-raising adventures and near encounters with gun-toting, sharp-shooting Nazis, Barwin’s use of humour evoked spontaneous laughter from this reader. Shock and guilt followed because what can be funny about Nazis hunting and slaughtering Jews? The humour, however, is like a trail of crumbs. It leads the reader through a landscape fraught with uncertainty and danger, and it offers hope.

The title, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted, is apt. It’s the feeling I’ve had touring the German countryside, strolling Buenos Aires’ Avenida de Mayo, and standing on the plaza at Tiananmen Square.  The ghosts remain. Their stories need to be told.


Bonnie Lendrum is the author of Autumn’s Grace, the story of how one family manages the experience of palliative care with hope and humour despite sibling conflicts, generational pulls and career demands. Autumn’s Grace is a powerful commentary on the need for well-organized and well-funded palliative care in private homes and in residential hospices. It’s a gift to people who would like to be prepared as they help fulfill the final wishes of a family member or friend. 

[Sclipiri de Stele · Rating 3 out of 5]

„Nimic la fel, totul bântuit” de Gary Barwin
O poveste atipică, dureroasă, dar plină de simboluri, care te face să reflectezi asupra felului în care istoria se repetă, în moduri diferite, dar la fel de crude.
Romanul ne poartă prin viața lui Motl, un tânăr evreu din Lituania, care trăiește fascinat de Vestul Sălbatic și cowboy, în ciuda faptului că lumea din jurul lui se destramă sub greutatea Holocaustului. Pe fundalul acestei tragedii, vedem cum Motl încearcă să-și țină familia aproape, să-și păstreze umanitatea și să navigheze prin pierderi sfâșietoare, prima iubire – Esther – și pasiunea sa ciudată, dar salvatoare, pentru westernuri.
Cartea aduce o analogie provocatoare între Holocaust și exterminarea amerindienilor din SUA. E un paralelism care, deși are sens, poate părea uneori prea alambicat și îngreunează firul narativ. Unele pasaje par aproape delirante, reflectând haosul emoțional al personajului principal și al lumii sale.
Dar marea lecție a romanului este cât de adânc pot rămâne răni din trecut.

”Uneori,un război continuă mult timp după ce s-a încheiat. Uneori, trecutul e ca o bomba cu ceas, care ticăie până la explozia sa programată și uneori neașteptată.”

Această frază surprinde perfect ideea că traumele nu dispar odată cu ultimul foc de armă.
Nu este o carte ușor de parcurs, dar e una care îți rămâne în minte. Dacă ești în căutarea unei lecturi care să îmbine istoria, introspecția și un strop de nebunie creativă, Nimic la fel, totul bântuit merită încercată.

[bronwyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a super fast read- very enthralling. It’s one of those books you can read very fast if you choose to do so, but can also stare at a couple of impactful lines for 10 minutes, just pondering.

I think I would give it a 3.5, simply because the random connection between the Jewish people and the Indigenous people was out of place. It was frankly absurd. The two topics may very well be connected, but it came in out of thin air and really served no purpose to the plot line. The authors’ descriptions of the Indigenous peoples seemed very… off as well. Heavily stereotyped. Also, I didn’t see how the western theme fit in. Of course you can SEE it, but it felt very forced and to be honest unnecessary. I understand the correlation between Jewish people and “classic” wild-west “Indians”, but that was hardly touched on. The characters are shallow, and despite the amount of development they could undergo throughout the novel, hardly any is shown. Most of the characters’ personalities are just left to the readers imagination. This is fine in some circumstances, however this is a heavily character oriented novel.
Also… wtf is with the testicle thing?? If I’m being honest… it is why I picked up the book. It sounded so ludicrous I didn’t honestly think I would enjoy it at all. After finishing it, I didn’t really understand the point the author was trying to make….

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every. Word. Counts.

I laughed many times, but twice so hard that I had to put the book down. I cried nearly twice, as well.

Gary Barwin's Nothing The Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy is three-hundred pages in which I truly believe every word was scrutinized. The narrator performs with such consistent enthusiasm and individualism that brand new words, German words, and Yiddish terms were all as clear as the jokes were funny.
Barwin's book is a masterclass on characters and voice. Every new person speaks on subjects with which only they would know, but they also speak with unique syntax. Later in the text I encountered a character who repeated the last few words of her sentences for emphasis. For emphasis! Individuals are written as individuals.
When I pick up WWII content, I am cautious of feeling too much. Will it be too sad? Inevitably. The holocaust is a very sad subject. Barwin's willingness to explore the realism of the holocaust and his deep comprehension of the necessary apathy some of the characters must adopt at the time in order to survive make this text accessible. Everyone grieves differently at the end of the world.
I love this book so much, it's total win, for me.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in Eastern Europe. 344 pp. It took me a while to get into this style of storytelling and realize how much was being imagined by characters versus how much was real. So many puns, most of them very clever. And overall quite imaginative humor. (“I’d kill a Schutzstaffel for some coffee right now. Of course, I’d kill one anyway, but the coffee’d be nice.”) Interesting parallels between how Native Americans have been historically treated by whites and how Jews were treated by Nazis. ("But to be a Jewish cowboy is to be more Apache than those Eurosavage bratwurst-coloured Österreich rustlers, stealing across the plains like the herd of plagues they drive." and "...we’re genocide buddies.”)

Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy by Gary Barwin

[Robert Irish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Historical fiction turned into picaresque quest novel. Young Motl on a mission for Tsarist Russia into Switzerland to upend the Communists plotting against Mother Russia, instead gets his cojones shot off by a misfire from Samy Rosenstock--who is in the process of transforming into Tristan Tzara. The family jewels lie frozen on a neutral Swiss glacier. And so the stage is set for a 1941 quest for the cowboy-novel-reading Lithuanian Jew to retrieve the family treasure and the hope of lineage. It's a tale that involves Nazis and Indians, death and circuses. The novel travels very close to the edge, sometimes being a little uncomfortable as it pokes fun at things that hurt. It makes striking parallels for today: Indigenous people and Jews are "genocide buddies".
It is brilliant. Barwin is a master stylist in the playful fashion of someone in love with words. He makes you laugh and then choke back the laughter as a truth strikes home.

[Blair Colwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is beautiful. It’s so strange, so camp, so cheesy. Motl the Jewish cowboy is a young man escaping the Nazis with his mother, he makes corny dad jokes and puns every step of the way, he and his companions drop amusing little one liners, the plot gets conflated with tall tales of Motl’s shot off testicles and stints at the circus .. but every now and then the author gives you a glimpse of what really happened; Too horrific not to drench in satire. It’s so perfectly written to show the resilience of the Jewish spirit, the ugliness of genocide. And the way it comes together in the end really moved me.

As a Canadian, the author’s comparisons of the First Nations here to the Jews in the Holocaust was so appreciated. We can’t hold the Holocaust up as the greatest mass murder of all time without acknowledging our own role as a genocidal nation. It did a great job of subverting the cowboys and Indians tropes that Motl is fanatical about.

Great book, highly recommend.

[Razvan Banciu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nu-mi vine să cred.
Subiectul este departe de a fi unul ofertant, în primele câteva pagini trăiesc cu impresia clară că dragul domn Barwin ne ia la un mișto crunt, ajung chiar pe punctul de a ne lua la revedere, când observ că metaforele și figurile de stil (multe dintre ele de mare adâncime) încep să curgă nestingherite, există umor, (auto)ironie și empatie la greu, moment din care chiar încep să iubesc această carte și pe protagonistul ei, naivul înțelept Motl. Iată doar câteva dintre roadele gândirii sale:
- doi lupi și o oaie votează ce să mănânce la cină, aceasta a fost istoria lânoasă a evreilor și a indigenilor
- cine caută refugiu în foc, când sare din tigaie?
- era ca și cum ai înota fără să știi nimic despre înot; sau despre apă
- până și durerile mele au dureri, iar durerile sunt părțile care dor cel mai puțin...

Așadar, dacă aveți timp și un pic de răbdare, aceasta este o carte ce merită citită. Are toate calitățile unui roman picaresc, tehnica de povestire în povestire din Peripețiile bravului soldat Svejk și chiar mai mult.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two novels written almost 80 years apart. Two authors describing a reality that borders on absurdity. Two characters whose flight from the Nazis mixes humor and horror. These statements only partly describe “The Passenger” by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (Metropolitan Books) and “Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy” by Gary Barwin (Random House Canada). One work offers a view of Jewish life just as the Nazis began their reign of terror, while the other looks back at events that took place decades before.
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/past...

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great romp through Nazi-occupied Europe by a Jewish couple thrown together by circumstances, and a couple of Indigenous fellow travelers for a while. It takes a wild, humorous spin on a grim bit of history. There are a number of forgivable anachronisms, and much is highly improbable, so it is a bit like a Looney Tunes cartoon most of the time.
I thought the road trip at the end wasn't really necessary, but it doesn't hurt, though the tone is different.
The Jewish cowboy thing reminded me for the first time in eons of the novelty song, The Ballad of Irving (on YouTube).
I wonder what Motl and Esther did with the body of the Nazi that Motl shot in Switzerland.

[Elizabeth D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the strange, funny, sad story of Motl the Jewish Lithuanian wannabe cowboy. A bit of an adventure story where Motl, eventually joined by Esther, meet fellow travellers who share their lives and sometimes a crust of bread in their shared challenges. Some are friends, some not so much, but all leave their impact on his life.

The writing in this is so beautiful. Funny. Sad. Touching. It draws on so many influences and is such a delight to read. Some parts were harder to read but it was a very satisfying journey. I left Motl like I was saying goodbye to a friend and I’m grateful for being one of his strange travel companions.

[Christie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book gave me whiplash. Very funny parts, parts that are supposed to be funny but are not (probably just a taste thing), alternating with the horrors of the Second World War and the holocaust.

It was just too much for me. And the start, that whole testicles rolling around the glacier thing, was just too much. Not funny, just…..goofy. Not a feeling I know how to reconcile when reading about the holocaust.

It just didn’t work for me. Maybe because I was also listening to Black Earth while reading it.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 2 out of 5]

So, after a beguiling beginning, it all went down hill for me...and I just managed to stagger to part three of this deeply weird and twisted work. Under the circumstances I would have rated it one star (as I didn't like it), but it's getting two stars because of one magnificent, over the top sequence, featuring a pathetic wanna-be Nazi, that was so funny I near wet myself. Other than that...I'm moving on...

[Tony Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a joy to read even if, most of the time, I had little idea what the heck was going on. The language, the tongue-in-cheek wit, the groan-worthy puns. The main drawback is a plot that meanders and doubles back on itself often. I assume this was on purpose to convey the crazy confusion of civilians displaced by war. It reads more episodic than a building narrative. But the ride itself is entertaining.

[Stephanie Baird · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, this book took me forever to get through. It was a good read, probably the most lighthearted of all the World War II books I've read. Gary somehow manages to infuse comedy into a subject matter that is typically very dark.

Something about the style of language used was difficult for me to read and absorb. Perhaps because the author is originally a poet, and I have a hard time with poetry prose.

[Not Sarah Connor Writes · Rating 4 out of 5]

With an incredibly bizarre premise, I was surprised at how well this book worked. With a lovable protagonist, surprising humour, and moments that just hurt, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted is a brilliant novel you don't want to miss!

Read my full review on my blog!

[Lenore · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I started this book I thought I would not finish it. Soon enough I was hooked by the story but still found there were too many irritations (for example, bad jokes in a book about negotiating through the horrors of the Holocaust). Then I realized they weren't really bad but truly clever. By the end, everything made total sense and made me realize that it would take another novel just to discuss this book.

[Gerald Bernstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting way to tell a story where the Litvak hiding in WWII thinks he is an American cowboy and some of the language is cowboy slang.

He read a lot about the Apache and the American Fitst Nations, guns, riding horses and holsters.
None of which he has any experience with.
Which is quite amusing when he needs to use these tools.

Entertaining but found the book languished a bit in the middle.

[Judith R. Bernstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I absolutely loved the first part of this book, much as I madly loved his Yiddish for Pirates. But then, it just lost steam. I was so disappointed. According to my Kindle, this was at 80 percent read. The characters then spoke the exact same way, almost the same words. And the style changed abruptly. It was like he lost interest in the story.

[Sonja Greckol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barwin’s achievement in this book is truly superb. He weaves the genocidal strands across continents with deft and outrageous humour, creating bursts of character and event, that buoy this skittish reader.