A Play for the End of the World by Jai Chakrabarti

Saturday, June 10, 2023--San Antonio

After enjoying his book of short stories recently, I decided to read A Play for the End of the World, the only novel written so far by Jai Chakrabarti.  An award winner and a book frequently recommended on reading lists, the protagonist is a young Polish Jewish man who lived in an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940s.  The director of the orphanage, knowing that he and the children would soon be taken to Treblinka by the German SS for extermination, had the children stage an Indian play, The Post Office by Tagore, as a way to prepare them for accepting their coming death.  Years later (in the 1970s), the boy who played the lead in the play and who escaped death on the way to Treblinka through a quirk of fate is living in New York where he has met the older orphan who befriended him in Warsaw and who also escaped death only because of being on a work errand at the time the SS arrived and escorted the others to the train for Treblinka.  Furthermore, he is dating a young woman he has met--the first time he has had a relationship with a female his age.  At the same time in eastern India refugees from the Pakistani civil war that resulted in the establishment of Bangladesh have encamped and established a village within woods where the Indian government does not want them to live.  A professor who knows the story of the production of the play in Warsaw and wants to fight the government's plans to expel (or maybe even kill) the refugees has decided that a production in the of the same play with the refugee children playing the roles might provide just enough publicity and international uproar to stop the government's plans.  He enlists the two survivors of the Warsaw orphanage to come to India and guide the production of the play.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.