Thanks to the War

Literary fiction | 240 p.

Thanks to the War

Tomer Pawlicki &


A tragi-comical, autobiographical novel by a promising new voice on the meaning of WWII for the third generation.

Did anything good come out of the Second World War? Twenty-five year old Tomer struggles with that question. He does not feel like a victim but people say he is. Fact is, he owes his existence to the war.

Looking for answers, Tomer turns to his mother, but she cannot tell him anything about their Jewish past. She would rather hear him tell her that he loves her. His father only spouts oneliners from eighties action movies and instructs his son to take after Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Then Tomer receives an unexpected letter from his grandmother, who survived the concentration camps. They start exchanging letters and slowly, he is able to change her views on the meaning of the war for the second and third generation.

Thanks to the War is a novel about remembering versus forgetting and the search for an identity. In his own poignant yet tragicomic way, Tomer Pawlicki shows what it means to live thanks to the war. And how to be happy about that.