3 comments about First Loves.

1. Ted Solotaroff loved deeply, otherwise he wouldn't have spent so many years married to the madwoman Lynn, whose portrait is etched at the heart of this unsentimental memoir of a decent man, married to a terrible, neurotic woman. She had some literary pretensios herself, but did little but kvetch at him while he labored hard to help create--not only create but define--what was in the 1950s a totally new literary field--important American writing was for the first time predominantly Jewish. His great friend, Philip Roth, continues to write great novels, while some of the other fellows of the period have been forgotten save in memoirs by their friends, like this one.
   
   But, it was a trenchant time in American writing, and one which will not soon be forgotten, even if some of the magic names seem to dwindle away even as he writes about them, all over, anew. Meanwhile Lynn goes from bad to worse, even as Solotaroff gives her at least the virtue of being extremely sexy and alluring. At times we can see why he stuck it out with her. His father, on the other hand, was a pig. There should be more books like this one, books in which we can see a literary movement being born 9and the machinery required to make one happen).



2. If you know the South Side, Hyde Park and the University of Chicago, and yearn for the days of the high 1950s - beatniks, bongo drums, struggling writers, waitresses, starving grad students - this book will sate your appetite. It beautifully recreates a lost world - so lost that it has almost been forgotten. Alternately tough, lyrical, and mother-ridden, Solotaroff is a wonderful writer.



3. If you worked as a waiter in the Catskills you are going to love
   this book. Even if you haven't you're still going to be intrigued
   by Ted Solotaroff's journey towards what I might call "certified
   smarts". How many of us come out of the big cities, public libraries and dysfunctional families? Somewhere there is a life of the mind that will pay the bills. Meanwhile we're stuck in a dining room wearing a funny outfit and serving food to the paying customers.
   Mr. Solotaroff tells us what his journey has been like, honestly, forthrightlightly and sometimes too graphically but
   always entertainingly.

5 comments about Alex Building a Life.

1. This book is a gem. I had bought it while on a trip in Israel, where we visited Alex's parents, met his brother and also went to his grave to pay our respects. Alex represented the qualities of a hero who fought for what he believed in and in the end paid with his life for Israel, the Jewish state. I loved reading about the many stories that made up his life during the army, especially the story about looking for the Teffilin. You will immediately be placed in Alex's world once you dwelve into this book. I highly recommend it. I couldn't put it down.



2. If this book had been simply about an IDF soldier who made aliyah, it would have been interesting at that. However, this book is that and so much more. It is an opportunity to experience how determined a young soldier can be, how focused and centered on his beliefs a young man can be and how warm and compassionate a young Jewish son, brother and friend can be... in his own words, at the time he was making these decisions and having these experiences. It is an opportunity to experience Alex's Zionism, compassion and strength. Every letter/journal entry written by Alex moved me and I am not often moved by books and by people whom I have never met. I recommend this book as highly as I possibly can.



3. Alex Singer was an American Jew who volunteered to fight in the Army of Israel. He did this because he believed in the Jewish's people's need for , and right to a historical homeland. He during his period of service acted with courage and real human consideration of others. He was not a hater but a person who sought peace, and the human face of the enemy.
   He represents the best of the Jewish people in their struggle to return and build their ancient homeland . He embodied the highest both in humane consideration and dedication to Jewish ideals.
   This volume of his letters collected posthumously by his parents tells of his story and struggle in a deeply moving way.



4. Alex's story is the definitive account of a true lover of Israel. Any one who has had thoughts about their own Zionist, Jewish beliefs must refer to this book for nothing less than spiritual guidance. Live life to the fullest through Alex's shoes, and cry when you realize his last letter was never finished. Alex Singer was a true hero to Israel and the Jewish people all over the world, as he made sure that one more family on the Lebanese border in 1987 could sleep soundly. Am Israel chai.



5. Alex's writings convey powerfully and persuasively, an attitude and tone of voice that seems to be heard less and less. It's a voice that says that life is a gift to be lived fully, joyfully, spontaneously; that Judaism has the power and depth to challenge and enrich every Jew, and through them to improve the world; that doing for others is the most effective--the only--way of fulfilling yourself; and that Israel is the Jewish home and that instead of rejecting it for its faults we should work to correct them. Alex writes beautifully and honestly. His drawings are vivid and personal

3 comments about Harry Haft: Auschwitz Survivor, Challenger of Rocky Marciano (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust).

1. The premise that this guy was so formidable that his life was threatened if he didn't take a dive against future champion Rocky Marciano is ludicrous. First, Marciano was an unknown who had only had 17 fights at the time, fighting out of New England, hardly the Mecca of the boxing world of the 1940-50 era. At the time of the fight you could have got odds of 500-1 that Marciano would never be heavyweight champion. Why would the mafia or anyone else threaten someone with death to lose to him?
   
   Also, Haft had lost 6 of his last 7 fights when he met Marciano. In fact he lost to Roland LaStarza just before the Marciano bout. Does his son want to claim he took a dive against LaStarza also? After all, Roland was 32-0 at the time, a much more likely prospect for heavyweight champion than Marciano. And he was also Italian and fighting out of New York.
   
   Three fights before he fought Marciano Haft lost to a guy who was 20-38-8! Come on, why in the wildest flight of fantasy would organized crime think they needed to threaten someone who was on a rapid downhill slide unless he lost to an unranked fighter who had only had 17 fights?
   And why would it be to Marciano, the unknown from the little town of Brockton rather than the relatively well known Roland LaStarza of New York, who really was on the fast track to the heavyweight title shot?
   
   Haft finished with a record of 13-7-0 with 7 KO's, losing 7 of his last 8 fights, with Marciano being the final loss. He was knocked out in 5 of those 7 losses, all in a span of six months. It is likely his license was suspended after the Marciano fight to protect him.
   
   It's a fabrication to sell a book. If LaStarza had been champion instead or Marciano, it would probably claim he took the dive against Roland instead.



2. This is an impressive addition to holocaust literature. The life of Harry Haft is well worth telling. When he entered Auschwitz he was forced to fight other Jews in bare-knuckle boxing bouts for the entertainment of the SS officers. These battles were usually fought to the death of one of the fighters.
   
   This is quite a different story than that usually told. He survived, and eventually escaped, likewise not a common occurance. He eventually made his way to America and decided to take his boxing skills into the professional arena here. In boxing at that time, the fighters were under the control of organized crime and he was eventually told to lose a match or he would lose his life.
   
   All of this left permanent mental scars on Mr. Haft that were never truly removed. This book is also a story of the life of his son, the author who in writing this probably understands his father better than he did before.



3. Harry Haft: Survivor Of Auschwitz, Challenger Of Rocky Marciano is the unique biography of a Jewish man who survived the Nazi concentration camps while being forced by brutal German officers to fight his fellow prisoners -- to lose was to die. Haft was only sixteen when he was sent to the concentration camps; four years later, he barely escaped with his life, and killed German civilians while struggling to survive. Prone to fits of violent temper, made worse by the permanent scars of the unspeakably inhuman treatment he endured, Harry Haft decided to take his talent for fisticuffs into the professional boxing ring. But in an era when boxing was heavily infiltrated by organized crime, gangsters threatened Haft with execution unless he lost his fight with heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano. Written by Harry Haft's son, Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano gives a complete picture of a flawed yet courageous human being, a survivor beyond measure, and is highly recommended for biography and holocaust studies shelves.

3 comments about Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning.

1. To my mind, this is one of the great books of the latter half of the twentieth century. Page after page of flawless writing filled with shattering observations and insight, all tuned to a visionary pitch whose serenity belies its hellish setting and themes. The final sections in particular are stunning. I'm confident that once you've tuned the final page, you'll be recommending Speak You Also to everyone you care about for years to come.



2. I haven't heard of Paul Steinberg before I read this book. The book is a gem and recollects the life of a camp inmate trying to survive the war. Steinberg was one of those people who helped
   the inmate leadership run the killing camps. He was a chemist in one of the IB Farben complexes. His short but powerful story shows how stronger people were consumed, while a flexible youngster survived the camps by doing what he had to do to stay alive.
   This should be required reading for those people who deny that the Holocaust happened. It is also a reminder that the general population should always remember these events. Steinberg found this book hard to write, but it was easy to read and conveyed a powerful perspective.



3. I just finished reading this great first-hand account of living through the Holocaust in Nazi death camps, by Paul Steinberg. What separates this text is that it seems less caught up with providing the reader with every single detail of daily life and more focused with the author's personal struggle, the friendships gained and forgotten, the death camp's social hieracrchies, and of course, his incredible task of survival. Paul Steinberg admits that he was an atypical Jew, uninvolved with Jewish ways and traditions, and he wonders why he survived and others perished; Jews that were more religious, possessed more wisdom, strength, etc. Truly, Steinberg's ordeal is almost unbelievable. He was able to do what he had to in order to survive. This book is great if you want to gain a good understanding of these historical events, a different time period in life, and the human struggle, all through the eyes of this remarkable man. He is honest and sincere, and holds nothing back.

2 comments about A Brush With Death : An Artist in the Death Camps (Suny Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture).

1. This review is hardly unbiased. The author, Morris Wysogrod, a commerical artist by trade, is my cousin and quite truly, a hero of mine. Whenever I visit my Cousin Morris' apartment, I am greeted as soon as I step off the elevator with genuine warmth and enthusiasm. His smile,unbreaking and his conversation,always scintillating, I am amazed at his sincerity and good nature despite what he has witnessed and experienced as a Holocaust survivor.

   His warmth and love for his fellow man is evident throughout his memoir. Morris provides a vivid look at pre-war Poland and the lives that were stolen from our families. And, much as he greets his guests with genuine warmth and affection today, he treats each character in his book with similar respect and reverence.

   His memory is outstanding as he remembers the many personalities and every day people of his Warsaw youth, and later in the death camps. His descriptions are detailed and he suceeds in bringing out the special qualities of each character. This is so important because more often than not, the people he describes with such affection will soon be dead at the hands of the Nazis. Much of Holocaust literature refers to the millions who were massacred. Morris didn't know the millions but he pays beautiful homage to the hundreds who crossed his path.

   From homage to carnage, Morris's story takes us into the Nazi occupation and his incarceration in several death camps. Similar to his skills in painting a picture of his pre-war youth, he is equally and shockingly vivid in his memories of the camps. The brutality, anguish, and sheer inhumanity he witnessed is brought to life as only a man of his artistic talents can do.

   And in the midst of the brutality, there is the friendships, the shared moments, and the appreciation for his fellow prisoners that is necessary for the reader to grasp onto so that he or she may continue with the chilling chronicle of Morris' survival.

   A Brush With Death has warmth, beauty and brutality. It is one of the many stories of the Holocaust experience, and one which I am confident will provide a unique perspective to the most horrific period in recorded history.




2. As a fellow survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Budzyn concentration camp, I can attest the accuracy of the author's harrowing descriptions of his experiences.

   I am amazed at the author's ability to recall so many details. He writes from the heart, without artifice. His spare drawings provide haunting illustrations of what words can't always describe on their own.

   Read this book. You will be moved.

5 comments about The Cap: The Price of a Life.

1. I will skip the personal details discussed by other reviewers, and focus on matters of historical significance. With one obvious exception, Frister shows an excellent grasp of factual events. He makes the unbelievable statement that the NSZ "did not kill Germans at all" (p. 263), only killed Jews, and then repeats the Communist-propaganda canard that the Brygada Swietokrzyska (Holy Cross Brigade) had fought on the German side.
   
   Even as late as 1941, Frister's mother didn't believe that the invading Germans intended to harm the Jews (p. 180). This adds to similar testimonies, and undercuts the argument that the massive Jewish-Soviet collaboration had been motivated by a desire to be protected from the Nazis.
   
   Unlike those who, from their safe perches, moralize to Poles about their need to have been more willing to risk their lives on behalf of Jews, Frister does not: "And what right did I have to condemn them? Why should they risk themselves and their families for a Jewish boy they didn't know? Would I have behaved any differently? I knew the answer to that, too. I wouldn't have lifted a finger. Everyone was equally intimidated." (p. 192)
   
   Frister writes: "Jozef Kruczek had prepared a perfect hideout for us. Beneath a bale of hay tossed with deliberate carelessness on the floor of the barn was a hidden trapdoor that descended to a cellar as big as a cottage. Before we came this had served as an abattoir. The screeching of the slaughtered pigs remained within its walls--a big help in avoiding German confiscations and getting the meat to the black market." (p. 97). Ironic to Polonophobes (e. g., Jan T. Gross), who accuse Poles of being willing to incur the German-imposed death penalty by illegally slaughtering animals, but seldom by hiding Jews, we see the same Polish secretiveness in both activities! (Besides, slaughtering an animal was a quick one-time act. Hiding a Jew was a continuous risk.)
   
   Unlike most Holocaust materials, Frister's work presents a balanced view of Polish and Jewish misdeeds. He mentions Poles looting Jews (p. 120) as well as regular Pole-on-Pole thievery (p. 100). The Judenrat, besides collaborating with the Germans in the roundups of Jews to their deaths (e. g., p. 92, 105, 120), also stole from poor Jews (p. 120). Jewish informers played an instrumental role in the uncovering of hidden Jews (e. g., p. 105, 112, 120, 190-191). Twice Frister escaped death despite being denounced to the Germans by Jewish informers (p. 112, 190-191), the latter of whom he found to be very clever and diligent in their undercover work. How many other fugitive Jews were betrayed, not by ethnic Poles as automatically assumed, but by Jewish Gestapo agents and informers?
   
   We were told, in the wake of the Auschwitz Carmelite convent controversy, that Jews find Christian symbols offensive because they remind them of past persecutions by Christians. Frister mentions a Jew, Henryk Leiderman, who had no problem with rosaries when it came to selling them to Polish peasants (p. 36).
   
   Frister spent some years in postwar Poland before emigrating to Israel. He is candid about the fact that he, and other Jews, got privileged positions in the Soviet-imposed Communist regime (p. 34, 169).



2. This is a fascinating work of fiction undoubtedly based on a great deal of real-life experience, or if you prefer, it is an autobiographical work with a few fantastic anecdotes included.

   Like all holocaust survivor tales, it includes numerous near misses and miraculous lucky breaks. People who survived ghetto life, concentration camps and death marches to write about their experiences were the exceptions, and invariably their stories include such amazing incidents.

   However, a few incidents read like pure wishful fantasy. I do not believe for example that Roman Frister actually snatched his girlfriend as she emerged from her marriage ceremony and drove her off for a three-day tryst in the mountains, before returning her to her groom...

   Ultimately the fact that his narrative seeks to define its own reality is what makes the book very interesting. The book is about what defines the self, what memory means, what is real, and what, if anything, really matters. The book reminds me in this way of Robert Musil's "Man Without Qualities."




3. I want to say that I really loved this book. The author takes us on one of the best adventure stories of human life that I have read in quite some time. Even though the central theme is his holocost survival he does not dwell on the subject too long, or I should say just long enough. His real adventure begins when he gets out. Learning to survive in the camps gave him the ability to achieve and become successful in life.

   I hope Hollywood picks this one up. I'd love to see it on the screen.




4. This is not Etty Hillesum. This is not Victor Klemperer. This is not Primo Levi.

   I can believe that the author saw his mother killed before his eyes. I can believe that he watched his father die in a camp. I can believe that he survived the camps. After that, I just don't know.

   There are too many heroics for one teenage boy. There are too many miraculous escapes for one survivor. There are too many stories which sound vaguely familiar from elsewhere.

   The book appears to be a life's story which has foundation in fact but which has also liberally incorporated material from the general holocaust history.

   After 90 pages I gave up in exasperation. There seemed to be too many stretchers in the details. They tainted the credibility of the whole.

   A few weeks later I picked up the book again. I started making allowances. After all, if the author wanted to include in his account real outrages which were suffered by others, the outrages did nonetheless occur. I doubt none of them.

   But then near the end of the book I quit again in pluperfect exasperation. The author's story of how he broke back INTO the camp again after an inauspicious breakout lacks plausability completely. He says that he "trampolined" himself back over the fence from the tarpaulin top of an adjacent German truck. This is pure poppycock. The tarpaulins on army trucks are loose, flappy affairs. They are NOT taut, springy, trampoline devices. Not even a true trampoline, if it had been there, would have achieved what the author proposes. Magical realism does not belong in holocaust memoirs.




5. This is one of the best autobiographies ever written, and I have read many. Images from this book will stay in my mind forever, and puts all other troubles and accomplishments into prospective. Frister's eyewitness account proves that there can never be vindication enough for the victims of the Nazi regime.

3 comments about Hidden Child.

1. A very powerful and exquisite book. I recommend this book to all middle school educators. It would do well on a summer reading list. The book is moving and empowering. The hidden children are often an overlooked part of high school Holocaust studies. This book speaks volumes about human nature, from the couple who took him in, a Hidden Jewish child, to exploit a slave like labor, to the people who really helped him survive. Isaac Millman's description of the changes in his life from the perspective of the child that he was during the is moving and informative. This is a courageous book. I recommend it to All.
   
   Also, the artwork is stellar. Very moving on so many levels.



2. Isaac Millman tells the true story of his youth spent in hiding from the Nazis in a compelling memoir that features his outstanding artwork. We follow young Isaac as he and his parents enter the Free Zone of France, only to find that this is only a respite until the Nazis again intrude. Isaac's father is taken to a "camp", which he and his mother are allowed to visit once; then disaster falls as he and his mother are rounded up for deportation. How Isaac escapes and is placed in foster homes for the duration of the war is told through Millman's sparse writing and his vivid drawings. As with most Holocaust tales, there is no happy ending, but Millman survives and is able to share his journey with us, and that is all we can ask. This is a splendid book that shows how even the youngest victims of the Holocaust found inner strength. We are privileged to know their stories. Recommended.



3. During World War II over a million Jewish children were murdered by Nazis: survivors were often those who were in hiding. Author Isaac Millman was one of these children, and his story recounts the kindness of strangers, his move from city to countryside, and how he was forced to shed his Jewish identity to survive. After the year he kept his story to himself: fifty years later it's told, in Hidden Child's series of black and white photos and first-person memoir for grades 5-8.

2 comments about My Mother's Eyes: Holocaust Memories of a Young Girl.

1. This is a beautiful book where holocaust experiences are written in a simple and profound manner. It is not morbid. It is a very human story.



2. Anna Ornstein was my first psychiatry teacher in medical school, so that is my bias. When this short, powerful, articulate woman entered a lecture hall full of hypercritical American medical students like myself, what impressed me most was her courage. We were a tough audience of concrete-minded scientific reductionists, and she came with her heavily accented English and provoked us to think about feelings and the meaning of mind and emotions when we, lost and overwhelmed in a world of memorizing anatomical structures, metabolic pathways, and Nernst equations, were least ready for it.
   
   As I learned more about the work of Prof. Ornstein and her equally impressive husband, I came to understand why she wasn't the least bit intimidated by our sophomoric arrogance (we were often merciless to lecturers).
   
   The kindness and attentiveness of this short giant of a teacher, therapist, and theoretician, was equally as present, and most visually reflected in her strikingly bright, beautiful eyes that look like they miss nothing. (Yes, you detect the student's crush here.) What she and her husband have taught this poor student, as well as many good ones during their estimable careers, is the complexity and healing power of empathy. To have survived the holocaust and devoted a career to the study and teaching of empathy! Can there be a more powerful triumph?! Yet here is another; this wonderful little book.
   
   This book is a gift of deeply personal remembrances. They are at the same time universal in their emotional power, because of Dr. Ornstein's ability to use words to bring her experience very near to the reader. She integrates in simple, eloquent prose the texture and emotions of the experiences. The imagery is as powerful as film, no, more so.
   
   I cried my way through many of these memories. Though they were not my own, they were brought so close by Prof. Ornstein's words it felt as though they were. The tragedy that befell the Ornstein's and so many others, lost and surviving, uplifts and enriches as much is it hurts and warns. She has achieved her goal; those lost will not be totally lost because she has helped us to remember.
   
   The illustrations are works of art, beautiful, powerful as well, and are a complement to the word pictures which nonetheless stand on there own.
   
   Readers of this beautiful book will not forget these painful and beautiful pictures, seen through Anna Ornstein's eyes.

No comments about They'll Have to Catch Me First: An Artist's Coming of Age in the Third Reich.

2 comments about Reflections of Prague: Journeys through the 20th century.

1. This is a tragic memoir of a son whose father was murdered by the Communist regime. The author sets the stage beautifully by giving the history of the Czech nation, the plight of its Jewish population, and the suffering at the hands of the Nazis and Communists. He weaves the story of his family into this history with great skill. As a native Czech who had some similar experiences to those of Ivan Margolius, I particularly appreciated his attention to detail, his accurate and beautiful descriptions of Prague and the Czech countryside, and his use of poetry throughout the book. The reader cannot help but weep for a son who has such deep feelings and who carries with him such deep sorrow for a father whom he knew for only a few very short years. A wonderful book!



2. "Never fall down!"
   
   Roughly translated from the Czech refrain that author Ivan Margolius' resilient mother, Heda Margolius Kovaly, would often exclaim when life in the former Czechoslovakia threw their Margolius clan one too many rotten tomatoes.
   
   Ivan and Heda, of course, are son and wife to the late Rudolf Margolius, a one-time deputy minister in the former Czechoslovakia's Ministry of Trade.
   
   History reveals that on December 3, 1952, Rudolf and ten other falsely-accused -- mostly Jewish -- members of the former Communist government's inner circle were hanged in what has since become known as the "Slansky Affair" or "Slansky Plot." Slansky was a trumped-up list of charges that first Czechoslovak Communist President Klement Gottwald orchestrated against forteen prominent members of his administration.
   
   The Slansky Plot was the culmination of a major part of Gottwald's Stalinist-inspired campaign of terror against the citizens of Czechoslovakia. His aim was to smash them into socialist submission, with Czechoslovakia at the time being the most "Western" of all the newly-established "Bloc" countries.
   
   "Never fall down" became Ivan Margolius' mantra as he returned more than forty years later to the now-democratic Czech Republic to retrace his father's once-shining career's steps. Ivan's search lead him straight into the former Czechoslovak archives. From there it was where the author was successful in clarifying heaps of missing details that had eluded Ivan Margolius for most of his adult life about the life of his famous father.
   
   Until the age of sixteen, Ivan hadn't precisely known the circumstances surrounding his father's passing. Heda, like most of her fellow citizens living under the socialist yoke, dreaded divulging any information about Rudolf Margolius to her lone son, fearful how it might affect his future work and life prospects inside the Communist system.
   
   Featuring prominently in this book are letters. For instance, one is an ambiguously-crafted note Rudolf had penned to his young boy, which reveals shades of the inner-agony that Rudolf and his fourteen co-accused must have felt while awaiting their execution under the libels. It had been kept from author by Heda until well into Ivan's teens.
   
   Since then, Ivan Margolius' life filled with a burning curiosity to truly know of the circumstances surrounding his father's tragic demise. By then, Ivan was already comfortably settled, living in exile in the British capital, London. It built up until he demanded to know just what had really happened to the man he once called 'Tato', Daddy?
   
   Why had Rudolf Margolius been [...] as a "subversive spy" who "had endangered the health of Czechoslovakia's children?"
   
   Were the charges laid against Rudolf Margolius even true?
   
   Heda knew them to be falsehoods, all, yet Ivan just had to know for himself.
   
   What emerged from the author's research was that Rudolf Margolius hardly even knew Rudolf Slansky, one of the Group of Fourteen rounded up in his eponymously-named trial. Rudolf Margolius hardly had a bad bone in his body, with Ivan remembering their times cavorting around the Czech countryside fondly. Rudolf Margolius was a dedicated father, husband, and moreover, as Ivan unearthed, had served the interests of the then-new Czechoslovak "people's republic" with all his heart.
   
   Rudolf Margolius sincerely believed in the bold promises of Lenin-style Marxism. He renounced all claim to his capitalist past from before the War, and after Rudolf's return to Prague from the Dachau concentration camp, he instructed his wife Heda to liquidate all of their parents' former possessions and assets, dedicating the sale's profits to the State; such was the fervour of his dedication to the socialist cause.
   
   Ivan Margolius needed answers to questions he could find only by returning to the sordid past. To the place where his life changed forever, Prague. The book tells that story...
   
   --
   
   
   REFLECTIONS OF PRAGUE is a stunning walk down memory lane. Within a neatly-contained 300pp. of well-structured, sometimes whistful, but mostly evocatively-written narrative, Ivan Margolius finally discovers for himself just who the man once known as his father really was.
   
   Margolius still awaits an official public apology from the present Czech authorities. As inheritors of the government which destroyed the life of his father, it is they who are responsible for issuing a Formal Sorry.
   
   REFLECTIONS, however, is about that and more. It reflects, as its name states, on things such as:
   
   ** What Prague was like during its inter-war years.
   ** What life was like in the capital under Nazi occupation in the Protectorate.
   ** What became of Bohemia and Moravia's 88,000 Jews, more than 47,000 from Prague alone.
   ** Why Communism was such an "attractive" option for Czechs following WWII.
   ** How influential the Soviets were in Czechoslovak affairs, and how they had contributed to the state of terror in early '50s Czechoslovakia.
   
   These broad strokes of Central European history are on full display as Ivan relives his mother and father's pasts.
   
   REFLECTIONS contains anecdotal evidence Ivan had heard from Heda over the years, and makes available his painstaking research into the former Communist state's archives. In his attempt to recreate the atmosphere extant at the time his father death, Margolius succeeds masterfully.
   
   I consider REFLECTIONS to be an essential primer for anyone with more than a passing interest in Czech history.
   
   If you're looking for an easy-to-read book on Prague written by a son of one of its most illustrious families, the Margoliuses, then stop searching. You've found it.
   
   Five stars.