Keen On

The Anglo-Jewish writer Tanya Gold went on holiday to Auschwitz and didn’t much like what she saw. She writes about the experience in “My Auschwitz Vacation: On Holocaust tourism” which ran in this month’s Harper’s. But, as she told me, she would have preferred the piece to have been entitled: “Her Gay Romp Through Jewish Poland” - in honor, of course, of Mel Brooke’s satirical “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” from his 1967 movie The Producers. And there is certainly something Brookean about Gold’s predilection for outrage - a healthy thing, I suspect, especially given the soporific quality of much contemporary Holocaust writing. Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist, who has written for the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, and the Sunday Times (London), amongst other publications. She was awarded Feature Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2010, also being nominated for Columnist of the Year, and was commended in the Feature W