A haunting and unrelenting volume of Holocaust-centered works.
Rosensaft explores the grief into which he was born in this collection of poems.
The author was born in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp to two survivors of the Holocaust. His older brother, Benjamin, was killed at a concentration camp during the war, an event that the poet references in “A Refusal To Forgive the Death, by Gas, of a Child in Birkenau”: “my mother’s son / my mother’s child / his ashes diffused / toward the stars / almost three years / before I was born.” Rosensaft’s poems reverberate with loss as he grapples with the guilt of Polish bystanders who watched Nazis round up their Jewish neighbors and with his own longtime distrust of German names: “the difference,” reads one poem, “between John Smith / and / Hans Schmidt / is that I never wonder / whether John’s father / killed my brother.” His ruminations extend beyond the scope of World War II to subsequent genocides as well as more recent events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement: “we must now all shout / that Black lives matter / until no child of God / ever again dies gasping / ‘I can’t breathe.’ ” The opening poem, “in the seconds after the truck hit me,” reveals the poet as a grandfather, still acutely aware of the fleetingness of life and all that can be lost in a split second. Rosensaft’s poems are sparse and measured, filled with images of ghosts, fires, ash, and darkness; they’re rarely portraits of quiet grief. More often, he animates the words with simmering anger as they voice frustration toward perpetrators, bystanders, and even God. It’s a cohesive collection, though some of the most affecting moments are when the author wanders further afield, as when he remembers his deceased parents while at a hotel in sunny San Remo: “paradise comes in different forms / we each have our own / if we can find it / mine is here.” Even so, his staccato verses always find their way back to the Holocaust era, reminding readers that some parts of the past are always present.
A haunting and unrelenting volume of Holocaust-centered works.Pub Date: April 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-952326-54-7
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A graceful debut.
A series of essays cohere into an evocative memoir.
In her first book, Zoffness, winner of a Sunday Times Short Story Award, gathers thoughtful pieces on themes that include motherhood, anxiety, and Jewish identity. Raised by extraordinarily fearful parents and worried about bequeathing her own anxiety to her son, the author studied medical journals and textbooks “to learn parent-child transfer.” She tries to assuage her 6-year-old’s fears, she tells her therapist, by putting up “a shield of faux calm.” The therapist referred her to a nearby doctor: “Maybe,” she suggested, “if you talk to her you can respond to him with real calm instead of faux calm.” Her 4-year-old son, too, incites her worries because he is obsessed with becoming a police officer. Zoffness is dismayed by “the heraldry of dominance and toughness that my boys can’t help but inhale,” and she finds it difficult to talk about injustice and brutality with such young children. She comes to realize, though, that the child is not drawn to violence; as the younger sibling, he just wants to exert some power. In “Ultra Sound,” Zoffness reflects on her tense relationship with her own mother, a deeply private woman who refuses to share details about her past as a performer. “Holy Body” merges the theme of motherhood with Jewish identity: Zoffness chronicles her mikveh, or ritual bath, intended, in part, “to help Jews of all stripes honor life transitions or commemorate occasions.” Zoffness acknowledges her momentous transition from childbearing in contrast to a friend, a mother of three, who has become a gestational surrogate, an act of altruism the author finds both selfless and mystifying. In other sharp pieces, the author recounts teenage angst and a friend’s betrayal; a visit to an astrologer recommended by a therapist; and confronting evidence of the Holocaust in the idyllic city of Freiburg, where Zoffness was teaching.
A graceful debut.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-952119-14-9
Page Count: 165
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Aly delivers again, this time expanding his lens outside of Germany to offer further revelations about the Holocaust.
The award-winning German author dips into his vast archive of resources to produce a major work on anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism has been around for centuries. Though occasionally somewhat dormant, usually during times of fiscal strength and political peace, it always returns to rear its ugly head, each time spelling disaster for Jewish populations. Aly—the highly respected historian of the Holocaust who won the 2007 Jewish Book Award for his excellent Hitler's Beneficiaries—examines the period of 1880 to 1945 to show how, why, and in what forms anti-Semitism increased sufficiently to support the Nazi concept of the Final Solution. The author ranges widely across Europe, examining Russia, Romania, France, and Greece as well as Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and other less-explored locales. “There is no way we can comprehend the pace and extent of the Holocaust,” writes Aly, “if we restrict our focus to the German centers of command.” While Jews were restricted from many jobs, they applied all their strength and determination to areas that were permitted, such as pharmacology, medicine, and journalism. Governmental actions began with bans on Jews serving municipalities and joining trade associations, and they also experienced limited access to education. After World War I, the concept of self-determination morphed into a brand of nationalism and misguided “racial theory” that led to increased animosity and violence. “Insofar as gentiles in the first half of the twentieth century pressed for Jews to be partially or completely stripped of their civil rights or insisted they be shipped off to somewhere outside Europe,” writes the author, “they were motivated by [an] obsessive anxiety: the fear of a supposedly overwhelming power and the real intellectual and economic agility of a small, precisely delineable ‘foreign’ group.” Though the gruesome subject and detail are sometimes tough to swallow, readers should forge ahead, relishing the author’s incredible research and singular scholarship.
Aly delivers again, this time expanding his lens outside of Germany to offer further revelations about the Holocaust.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17017-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HOLOCAUST | JEWISH | HISTORY
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