A young, beautiful Jewish widow seeks a new life in the DP camps of postWW II Germany in this historically fascinating but emotionally flat first novel by a Polish-born psychologist (Bringing up a Moral Child, 1985, with Michael Schulman, etc.). Manya Gerson, a Polish nonpracticing Jew and an enthusiastic member of the Communist Party, survived WW II by posing as a Christian and working with her husband for the Underground. Though she and her husband, Joseph, live to see the end of the war, Joseph is murdered a short time later by an anti-Semitic Party member. Numb with grief, Manya, after someone tries to shoot her as well, quits her job as a literature professor, flees the country, and eventually finds herself in an American camp for displaced persons in Allied-occupied Germany. Manya feels as alienated at the camp as she did during the war—a Jew who looks and acts like a Gentile, who has no interest in emigrating to Palestine, who wishes only to continue her quiet life in Europe rather than devote herself to supporting the Jewish cause. Nevertheless, her fellow Jews befriend her, and Manya soon finds herself torn between two fellow residents: a reckless gun-smuggler from Palestine, who's certain to be killed eventually, and a Czech scientist with a job and a secure life waiting for him in Paris. Shuttling back and forth between these two men, Manya herself remains strangely unmoved and unmoving, and her decision to throw in her lot with the passionate supporters of an Israeli state, despite her own lack of enthusiasm for the idea, ultimately fails to convince. Wonderful historical detail, and a potentially gripping plot, but handicapped by a drab, almost academic, style.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-882593-17-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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