As ironic judgments of monstrosity and meaning go, this one is intelligent and deeply felt, but insufficiently mordant.
Tragedy is overlaid with Jewish humor as an inoffensive man survives war and nationalism in Central Europe.
In an afterword, Bulgarian writer and filmmaker Wagenstein (Farewell, Shanghai, 2007, etc.) acknowledges Jewish jokes as “a source of courage and self-esteem through the most tragic moments,” and his discursive novel makes considerable use of them in its account of the life of Isaac Blumenfeld. The son of a tailor in the shtetl of Kolodetz, Blumenfeld was a dreamy boy who fell in love with Sarah, the sister of his lifelong friend Rabbi Shmuel Ben-David, and was swept up in history. In 1918, Blumenfeld was called up into the Austro-Hungarian army but the war was lost before he saw action and he returned home a Pole. Twenty-one years later, now married to Sarah with three children, he is called up again and again steps down before fighting, this time as a comrade, Kolodetz having been annexed by the Soviet Union. In 1941, Blumenfeld is captured by the Germans and sent first to a labor camp, then to typhoid-ridden Flossenbürg. After the Americans liberate the camp, Blumenfeld succumbs to the disease. Once recovered, he learns his family has perished and settles in Vienna until he’s arrested by the Soviets, tried for high treason and military crimes and sent to Siberia for ten years. The story ends abruptly, years later, with Blumenfeld back in Vienna, imagining himself and Sarah flying—Chagall-like—into the future.
As ironic judgments of monstrosity and meaning go, this one is intelligent and deeply felt, but insufficiently mordant.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59051-245-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Handsel/Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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