Professor Schiff’s Guilt

In prize-winning Israeli novelist/filmmaker Schiff’s insightful commentary on postcolonial responsibility (his first novel to be translated to English), an Israeli professor learns that a merchant ship belonging to his grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather has been discovered off the coast of an imaginary West African nation, so he travels there, hoping to reclaim his property and write a book. Never mind his proclaimed liberal stance, Professor Schiff is naively, reprehensibly blithe about his ancestor’s having traded in enslaved people. (He was also horrified when a friend offered him his African maid in lieu of moneys owed but captivated enough by her to accept.) Once in West Africa, the professor is arrested under the fictitious country’s Law for Adjudicating Slave Traders and Their Accomplices, Heirs, and Beneficiaries and makes things worse by unfolding his family’s history, acknowledging that his ancestor was a criminal—“at least by today’s standards”—but arguing for his noble intentions in striving to return to Africa families of the formerly enslaved, whom he’s persuaded (forced?) to convert to Judaism.