Sorry I took a day to respond to this, I've been thinking about it a lot. In large part because the attitude towards the Holocaust was actually one of the things that I found most alien to me in Israel. Like I mentioned, I haven't re-read the second half of the book, but I remember thinking that they did have dignity, even if they had little else. The thing I struggled with a lot in Israel was the assumption that there could be dignity only in fighting and winning, not in settling and doing the best with a bad situation.

I agree, for the most part the desolation in Chabon's books is pretty overwhelming--I hated Wonder Boys for exactly that reason (Gentlemen of the Road is much better on this front). I think a lot of that has to do with his lingering attachment to the "literary" genre. I think his books get increasingly less desolate as he's moved towards embracing other genres. But yeah, every time I get burned out on Chabon it's because nothing ever ends happily for anyone.

I always come back, though, because I love following the road that gets his characters where they go. I come from depressive, snarky Jews, so while I agree that that particular branch of Eastern European Jewry is over-represented, it's one that feels... familiar, I guess.