5 comments about The Diary of Anne Frank (Critical Edition) (Critical Editions).

1. The Diary of Anne Frank is one of those books many people read in school. For reasons I don't remember I was not one of them. I stumbled on this version and decided it was time.
   
   Overall this is an excellent compendium of the 3 versions of the diary. The first 175 pages give you the history of the Frank Family, how they were arrested and suspects for betrayal. It also delves into the challenges of Fraud that has been lodged against the diaries. The author shows how these claims are baseless and the gives you the process used to debunk the claims.
   
   This is not a simple read. This book is more for the scholar then the casual reader. Especially when faced with up to three versions of each passage in the diaries. The casual reader will probably find themselves skipping the other passages.
   
   My wife said there were versions that painted Anne as a Saint and I did not see that in this edition. I saw the average teenage girl with the usual complaints about family and the horrible times she found herself in. Yet, she managed to find herself infatuated with boys and tried to outlast the fate that would happen to her.
   
   This is a book all should read especially when considering it has been banned a few times.



2. I am going to tell you about the best book I have ever read. The best book I have read is
   The Diary of Anne Frank. It is about a little girl that is Jewish. It takes place in 1945 during
   World War II. It talks about them being scared of hearing a knock at the door. It talks about them getting sent to concentration camps and how the people get tortured there like in gas chambers that is were they stick you in a room air tight and fill the room with deadly gas fumes. They wood also cut all your hair off and tattoo a number on you. Most of the people would die because they would freeze to death because it was so cold. They were fed very little food and their beds had flies all around them and they would make you have a job like cleaning the bathrooms. So you can see people there were treated very badly. And all this happened because one man named Hitler wanted to do this all because the people where Jewish. These are just a few things why this is my favorite book. And I think that you should read this book too.



3. I really didnt know much about Anne Frank and the Holocaust until my seventh grade year. But once i learned about it i developed an interest in it. It was a sad SAD thing to study but it is life which i want to learn more about and it is history which i love to study. Anne Frank was the most interesting person that i studied about in the Holocaust. Read the book and find out just how interesting she was!!!!



4. I love this book, because it make me understand that all three versions of the diary that know Anne wrote her original diaries,two notebooks and 324 loose sheet while she was hiding.

   Anne did write alot about her friends, sexual feeelings, and fighting between her and her mother. The second one is missing,so she did finish the rewrite on loose sheet which is version B that the dated from December 7, 1942 to December 22, 1943. The last page of the rewrite on loose sheet on March 29,1994 about listening the radio broadcasting the Duth Exile from london that collected the daries and letters that people want to read then after the war. Anne did all the rewrite, but she never finished sadly, on August 4, 1944 the day of the arrest the nazi interupted her. She is a great writer of all times. I'm very obessed Anne Frank, because she is so smart!.

   Anyone want to about Anne's life was Melissa Muller's Biography "Anne Frank" This is a great book!




5. I'm glad someone decided to provide an uncensored version of Anne Frank's diary in English. This book contains English translations of three versions of Anne Frank's diaries, printed in such a way as to make it easier to compare them than if they had been printed back to back or in separate volumes. One version is Anne's fictionalized version. One is the, censored version as it was introduced to the Puritanical United States. The unabridged version is excellent, but not for prudes. Anne Frank was apparently bisexual, as well as a young woman of great intellect, insight and literary talent! I was amazed at how well I was able to relate to her, even though she was of another gender, born into a different race, raised on a different continent (Europe), about a quarter of a century before me! Thanks to this book, I fell in love with her!

No comments about Job: The Story of a Holocaust Survivor.

5 comments about Magda's Daughter: A Hidden Child's Journey Home (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series).

1. What I like best about this book is its straightforwardness. It is not mushy nor is it unnecessarily upsetting. Rather it is an honest and clear-eyed account of a wonderful woman, her colorful family, and their harrowing experiences during and after WWII.
   My 14-year-old daughter read it also and talked about it for weeks. Ms. Blaikie is her new hero. And she is one of my heroes too.



2. Evi Blakie is one of a "new" group of Holocaust survivors - the hidden children who spent their earliest and most formative years living false identities. These children began their lives when the war was over, trying to forge a new and genuine identity, trying to just to "normal" after spending their entire lives thinking war was normal. Like more recent children of war (in Rwanda, Bosnia, etc.) they must spend their entire lives trying to figure out who they are. But what makes this book so wonderful is that it not only tells a story not previously told, and not even that it is a more universal story than we would like to believe - but that she writes well - with strong language and vivid imagery that holds the reader spellbound throughout the telling - and breathless at the end.



3. I am a New Yorker who reads on the subway commuting to the office. On two occasions I missed my stop because I was so engrossed in "Magda's Daughter".

   This book is a tale of human adaptation and resilence. When I finished the book I was in great admiration of Ms. Blaikie. She is a woman of strength and insight.

   It certainly made an impression on how lucky I was to be born in the US after the war and reminded me of the immense suffering caused by the Nazis and the horrendous consequences of the Holocaust.

   Thanks for such a good read. It was a pleasure to get to know Ms. Blaikie.




4. The perspective of a Jewish child growing up in the sureal world of German occupied Hungary tears at your heart. An amazing adventure of survival. Surprising, very good



5. I could not put it down! It is funny and sad, the life's ironies are well described. This is more than a holocoust story. Anybody, who is interested in the effect of war on children should read it. This is a feminist book in the best meaning of the word feminist. A woman's strugle for identity, which is well decribed here, is one of the most important goal of the feminist literature.

   We are living in a time, when children are victims of wars. We should think about them and their future.

3 comments about The Blood Tattoo.

1. I am from the UK and have had great priveledge in meeting Ebi and becoming a friend to her. She has been my inspiration in devloping my knowledge on the Holocaust. Her book evokes all the emotions one can imagine. She has written from the heart and when one reads her book one can anly imagine what she and her family were going through. A must read. Thankyou Ebi for sharing your story with us, I know it must have been a harrowing experience when you wrote this but I am so glad you did.



2. Okay, Okay...you'll say I'm biased because it tells my Aunt's story and how she survived together with my most loving grandmother after removal from their home, imprisonment in a ghetto, and then the train deportation to Auschwitz. I have loaned my copy to so many people and each person returns it to me stunned. It is truly a gripping story and you will know my aunt through this book--she will touch you too. Please buy it, read it and then loan it to someone who wants or needs to learn more about modern man's greatest atrocity.



3. This book is the story of a young lady, that survived the Holocaust. With her mother and one out of three brothers she survived. Her mother would have been died if it worent for a Jewish Kopo who keep the secret of a her surviving mother. I personally experienced the story of this strong at heart lady, she visited my school as a volunteer Holocaust survivor.

1 comments about A Friend Called Anne.

1. Her name shall never be forgotten, for she told a story through her diary with such delicate words. She perished before she could live the fame she always dreamed of, changing the world without knowing she did so. Anne Frank has been known internationally because of her desire to keep a record of everything that happened to her during the time she lived. In A Friend Called Anne, Jacqueline Van Maarsen tells of her friendship with Anne ever since they met in Nazi-invaded Amsterdam. They watched together as their lives were slowly changing in ways that they didn't like but were powerless to prevent. When they met for the first time, they quickly became inseparable. This was until the day Anne and her family went into hiding to escape deportation to the Nazi concentration camps. Jacqueline describes the feeling of narrowly escaping deportation during the Holocaust and the tragedy of Anne's so sudden death. Although the book was presented well, the characters were lifeless which made this memoir tedious and unexciting.
   
   A Friend Called Anne has a plot that is neither appealing nor exciting. I found the book itself slow and difficult to understand. I was amazed at the fact that the novel was a true story but disappointed in the writing itself. The author didn't give a great amount of details, therefore making the background information unclear and confusing. I am aware that the Holocaust was an extremely devastating time period and Jacqueline Van Maarson does not express such a feeling of tragedy in great detail. Without the specific details and descriptions of personalities, feelings and settings, the biography was lacking in many ways. Although it was quite a good example of the true meaning of friendship and a special one at that, I would have liked to hear more about the Anne and Jacqueline's childhood friendship before the Nazi's took over. If the author had really gone into to depth about the troubles and whereabouts of Anne's family, the storyline could possibly be strengthened. Towards the end, Jacqueline learned that Anne had been in hiding with the rest of her family for quite some time. I would have liked it much better if the author switched back and forth between Jacqueline's tale and Anne's tale at that point. Instead, she focused mainly on Jacqueline whose tale was quite flat and uneventful. In the final portion of the book, I wanted to hear about Anne and her sister Margot captured in the Bergen-Belsen camp, where they were sent from Auschwitz. However, I enjoyed hearing Jacqueline's feelings after hearing of Anne's death. As she revisited Anne's hiding spot when times were worst, she spotted picture of her and Anne as young children and told Mr. Frank, "Looking at the pictures on the fading wallpaper of Anne's room in the secret annex was like looking at ghosts." But overall, I was disappointed in the book because I know how exciting Anne Frank's experience was and it did not portray appealing and exciting stories I was hoping for.
   
   I found the biography dull and depressing purely because the emotionless characters and lack of details. The author poorly presents the relationships between people and places. Nothing about the book amused me in any way, and in my opinion, that is my definition of a boring story.

No comments about Triple Exposure: Black, Jewish and Red in the 1950s.

1 comments about Drama and the World of Richard Wagner.

1. Dieter Borchmeyer, a professor at Heidelberg, is prodigiously well read. How can the man have a life outside of books? (But his website shows that he does.) For each of the fourteen chapters of this book, Borchmeyer settles on a theme, sometimes a tangential one, but a theme. Whether it's a literary source that we've overlooked or the antithetical attitudes of Wagner and Ludwig on religion vs. art, the subject at hand is fairly tight. This is not a book, then, with a clear thesis, and it suffers a bit from that. Moreover it is uneven: to this reader some of the subjects Borchmeyer chooses simply lack much interest. On the other hand, his chapter on the Ring is one of the most insightful I've ever read. So here's what I'd suggest: by all means read it, but with some judicious skimming.

2 comments about The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877-1959.

1. I have read a number of reviews of this book all of which praise Anthony David for his detailed study of the life of Zalman Schocken.
   David paints the portrait of a remarkable Renaissance figure, an innovative empire- building businessman , a great patron of the Arts, a humanist, Zionist builder of cultural life in the land of Israel.
   Schocken was born in Posen in Prussia, but built a business empire throughout Germany. His department- stores were forerunners of today's Malls. He combined in them a sense of the aesthetic ( Bauhaus architect Eric Mendlesohn was his designer) with a real understanding of the customers' needs.
   He also was an autodidact a lover of German and Jewish culture. The shock of his life came with the coming of the Nazis to power, and from then on he shifted most of his activities to Jewish cultural work. He also to a degree recreated a bit of the business empire he had in Germany, in then Palestine and the United States. 'Schocken Books' is one of his cultural monuments. He was the patron of Buber,Scholem, Elsa Lasker-Schuler, and most notably Agnon. Schoken had an eye for talent and an ability to support and sustain it.
   One of his major moves was his purchase of the newspaper 'Haaretz' as wedding gift for his son. This would become the Israeli equivalent of the NY Times.
   Schocken was also a great patron of the Hebrew University.
   Schocken contributed much to the building of Hebrew culture in the land of Israel, and Jewish culture throughout the world.
   A highly recommended work.



2. This is a professionally-written biography of the late German-Jewish philanthroper Zalman Schocken. I learned many things from this biography that I hadn't known about his life: that he was actually from Prussian-controlled Poland and thus, was not a "blue blood" German Jew, about his innovations in commerce which lead to the massive successes of his department store chain, and his relationship with other German-Jewish figures in the Zionist movement such as Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and S.Y. Agnon. I learned that Agnon kept his right-wing and very anti-Arab attitudes out of his books because his 40-year patron, Zalman Schocken, told him to do it. I learned that Schocken Books published a whole line of Jewish-subject-related books in Germany after the Nazis came to power, even exploiting their sepearation laws to be a "Jewish publisher."
   
   Up until the Nazis come to power, Schocken appears to be a man of talent and relevancy, both in the realm of business and also in the realm of Jewish cultural revival. The last 25 years of his life are portrayed as those of a man who has had the cultural and business orientation ripped away from him by Adolf Hiter and in relying on his previously-used models of success and meaning,falling into irrelevance.
   
   The author has worked hard to understand all of the angles of Schocken's life: as a businessman, as a successful autodidact and lover of literature and philosophy, as a philathroper, and even a bit about his personal life and his relationship with his family. The author has also mastered the intellectural and political background in which Schocken's life occurs, both in Germany and then in Jewish-Palestine, which eventually became Israel.
   
   Zalman Schocken was certainally a character and personality of an exceptional and excentric order and this books comprehensively explores all aspects of his life, his business endeavors, his social visions, his philonthropic endeavors, his ideas about culture, Judaism, and his relationships with other people.

No comments about The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov: Studies in Hasidism.

No comments about The Rishonim (ArtScroll Judaiscope series).