Lily Brett’s acclaimed novel Too Many Men was published 25 years ago, in 1999. Next month, a feature film adaptation, Treasure , directed by Julia von Heinz and starring Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry, will screen in Australia. The novel tells the story of a daughter of Holocaust survivors, 43-year-old Ruth Rothwax, and her 81-year-old father, Edek, who travel back to Edek’s native Poland – and to Auschwitz concentration camp (now a museum), which he survived.
They’re searching for answers to family questions and secrets. Brett, like her protagonist, is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, part of what is known as the second generation. Born in Germany, she then migrated to Melbourne with her parents in 1948.
She draws on the experience of growing up under the same roof as her parents’ acute trauma in her fiction. Reviewing Too Many Men, which would go on to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize and be shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, Kevin Brophy suggested it “might be the novel Lily Brett has been trying to write all these years”. The Australian called it her “masterpiece”.
Too Many Men was her fourth novel to inhabit second-generation Holocaust survivors (and she would again in two more, including a sequel, You Gotta Have Balls ). I am the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor , part of the third generation. My grandfather, Harry, was born in Berlin in 1920, to two non-practising Jews, Max and Edith, who both perished in camps (Max at Auschwitz , Edith at T.
