Shoah of moles

Shoah of moles is the father-in-law's chillingly casual name for a plan to exterminate the moles that had turned the land around the mother-in-law's house into a minefield of deep holes. The phrase, which borrows the Hebrew word for the Holocaust and applies it to burrowing rodents, was his proposed solution: definitive action needed to be taken by putting gas bottles at the entrance to their homes. The expression captures the family's unsettling habit of reaching for catastrophic, exterminationist language to describe the most mundane domestic irritations, treating mass death as a practical, almost jocular household chore.

The Father-in-Law's Declaration

The moles dug deep holes in what was also their land, transforming the grounds into a treacherous minefield. The father-in-law, a man given to pronouncements from the head of the table and laughter from atop the tractor he drove, declared that definitive action needed to be taken. His remedy was not traps or poison but gas bottles placed at the entrance to the burrows, a method designed to asphyxiate the entire colony at once. By naming this extermination the Shoah of moles, he collapsed the distance between the industrialized mass murder of millions and the removal of a garden pest, revealing a mind that processed violence through the vocabulary of genocide without apparent irony or self-awareness.

The Mother-in-Law's Grief-Stricken World

The phrase surfaces in the narrator's account of her mother-in-law's widowhood, a period of profound psychological unraveling. After her husband's death, the mother-in-law carried on washing his trousers, cooking for two, changing the pillowcases, and mending his underwear that was torn at the crotch, as though he might still return to wear them. She relived his death day after day, sitting in a daze with her head inside a bell, living in her body as though it were an infested house where she had to tiptoe through trying not to touch the floor. The only time she was at peace, she said, was in her sleep, when the spirit scatters, but she had serious difficulty sleeping and used to sleep-walk, once strolling through the village in a nightie shouting Fire! and another time using a shoe as a phone to converse with God.

The father-in-law's genocidal joke about the moles stands in stark contrast to the mother-in-law's inability to even scare away the flies or remove the eggs they had laid in the jar of homemade chestnut jam. Where he proposed industrialized extermination, she could not manage the most basic act of pest control, her grief having stripped her of the will to maintain even the boundaries of her own home. The moles, like her grief, kept digging deeper into the land, and she lacked the capacity to respond.

The Marriage Behind the Phrase

The Shoah of moles also illuminates the strange marriage that produced such a man. The father-in-law had never been one to spend long hours embedded inside his wife, nor entire afternoons, summers, clinging to her, nor days in the countryside entering her, satiating her. He did not even consider whether or not she got aroused, imagining instead that she had a stone in the depths of a cave rather than a vagina, and he always pictured her covered in the little shawls she embroidered. He got used to loving her as though she had been born that way, and she got used to being loved that way. This was a man who could propose gassing moles as a casual solution, who tracked deaths with marks in his groin from his time in the navy, who visited the local brothel, whose roving hand once found its way under the skirt of a secondary-school student on the bus and became the talk of the town. His monologues from the head of the table, his pedantry, and his laughter from atop the tractor all ended up locked in a pinewood coffin, along with his little secrets and his heroic exploits.

The Weight of the Word

The narrator's use of the phrase Shoah of moles is itself a form of dark commentary. By recording her father-in-law's casual genocide-speak, she exposes the moral vacancy at the heart of the normal family, a family she elsewhere describes as the most sinister kind. The moles, like the mother-in-law's grief, are a persistent, underground presence that cannot be easily eradicated, and the father-in-law's proposed gas bottles stand as a monument to a certain kind of masculine certainty that death, applied decisively, can solve any problem. The phrase lingers in the narrative as a grotesque joke that reveals the family's true nature, a casual willingness to reach for the language of mass extermination to describe the small annoyances of rural life.