Published to acclaim in Germany, Ron Segal’s Delicate is now coming to an English-speaking audience through a collaboration between Ayin Press and JBC’s Nu Reads program (and will be widely available for purchase in early 2027). This novel traces the fractured existence of Adam Schumacher, an Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor. Adam is falling deeper and deeper into the recesses of dementia; the recent death of wife Bella propels him to return to Berlin, the place where his story — the story that will singularly define him in the eyes of others, no matter what else has transpired — began. Segal is deft in assembling a character whose identity as a Holocaust survivor and writer creates ready-made points of tension in regards to memory and its limits.
Delicate does, indeed, grapple with an extremely delicate question: how should we engage with the memories of a Holocaust survivor when those memories are no longer reliable? There is an obvious answer: that the truth of an individual survivor’s narrative should be subsumed under the universal commandment to Never Forget — a commandment that Adam finds amusing, especially as his memory loss rapidly increases. “Life is a story; I look at it and realize that Max was wrong, no one remembers the beginning,” he muses. “All that is left to cling on to is the pathetic end of old people, whose memories of midlife have fallen into the spaces between cells in the brain, and contrary to what the children and grandchildren think when they visit the old folks’ home — they are aware of what is happening to them, of the last paragraph that is being written, the only thing that they are compelled to remember.” In other words: age makes liars of us all, no matter what we endured in our youth. The loss of his Bella, the details of which grow increasingly fuzzy as the narrative progresses, is the tragedy Adam wants to speak about, to compel others to remember. The Holocaust was a forced backdrop; can he not exert choice over which tragedy in his life was the most brutal to endure?
Though this is a somber and meditative book, there are smart, absurdist vignettes that catch the reader off guard. A German doctor, afraid to draw blood from the area of Adam’s arm where his tattoo is, says that he respects Adam and “ … wouldn’t want to stick a needle in [his] arm in the region of the number.” “When you are a celebrity,” Adam intones to the reader, “your number becomes a celebrity along with you. I look down at my arm and see how all the red dots around the number testify to unsuccessful attempts to insert an intravenous drip.”
Ultimately, Delicate is a different kind of Holocaust book — one that actively resists the label. Readers who surrender to Adam’s fragmented flashes through past and present are rewarded in Segal’s expert command of language, rendered sharp and exacting in translation. In the end, Adam Schumacher, fictional as he is, wants to be able to choose how he is remembered, with the understanding that even collective memory is not permanent. Readers will be inclined to agree with him.
Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler is a writer, folklorist, and Yiddishist. She is a frequent contributor to Lilith magazine, and her work has also been featured in Southern Cultures, the Jewish Women’s Archive, In geveb, the Bitter Southerner, Slate, and the New York Times. She coedited An American Girl Anthology: Finding Ourselves in the Pleasant Company Universe, which was published in May 2025 by University Press of Mississippi.
