5 comments about I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree: A Memoir of a Schindler's List Survivor.

1. The book I will Plant You A Lilac Tree by Laura Hillman is an excellent book. I would most likely recommend it to girls though. I would recommend it to girls because the book talks about Hannelore getting sexually assaulted and other things like her falling in love with Bernard (Dick) Hillman. I would also recommend this book because it talks about true fact that happened during the Holocaust. This book has been the best book I've ever read. One reason it is would be because she expresses her feelings about the people she loved and lost, but also how she hated what was happening to the Jewish religion. All in all if you're looking for a good read I think you should read the book I will Plant You A Lilac Tree.



2. This is one of the best books I've ever read on any subject. It was compelling reading--I, too, couldn't put it down.
   I love its honesty. Nothing was left out of this book. And yet it is not sensational or graphic. It's an honest, humane, and brave book about a terrifying time.
   I'm so grateful to the author for writing it.



3. This is the first-person account of Hannelore Wolff, a survivor of Nazi death camps and a Jew on Schindler's List. The story chronicles Hannelore's time when she leaves safety to accompany her mother and brothers to first a Jewish ghetto and then to a concentration camp in an effort to keep the family together. Hannelore then spends the next three years living day to day as she survives the disease, death, and horrors of the Holocaust. Her story is by turns one of luck, faith, and perseverance as she ultimately finds herself on Oskar Schindler's famous list and thus brought to the relative safety of his factory. Along the way Hannelore meets and falls in love with her future husband, Dick. Mrs. Hillman gives us a chilling account of a desperate time and helps us all to remember those who should not be forgotten. A tremendous story that will touch you deeply. Highly recommended.



4. This book is great! I have always been interested in this subject and i don't normaly read books! I'm a junior in high school and i enjoyed this book ALOT!!! Great character plot and great ending!! I don't want to return it to the library!! Also i share the same last name!



5. One day I had nothing to read and I decided to get this book because I heard was great. It kept me on the edge of my seat through the whole book! I finished in less than two days and have read it five more times since.

5 comments about The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945.

1. One of those amazing stories that makes you realize just how much the human spirit can take, and still survive. And just how inhumane we humans can be towards each other. Once you start reading, you won't be able to put this down.



2. Szpilman reveals the tragedy of Jewish life in Warsaw under the German occupation from 1939-1946. Szpilman's autobiographical work was first published in postwar Poland in 1946 but then quickly removed from circulation by Polish authorities. An accomplished pianist before the war, Szpilman played for Polish Radio during the siege of Warsaw and later within the Jewish ghetto to provide food for his parents and siblings. With the systematic liquidation of Jewish life in Warsaw and separation from his family, Szpilman's life took a series of surprising twists. As the reader views life in the ghetto through the eyes of a survivor, his escape from the ghetto before the Jewish up-rising and his ultimate survival consistently depended upon a timely combination of luck and sympathetic acquaintances B including a German army officer.
   
   Included with Szpilman's memoirs are excerpts from Captain Wilm Hosenfeld's diaries and Wolf Biermann's own brief commentary. Hosenfeld's equating of National Socialism with Stalinist Communist and Biermann's emphasis on Szpilman's willingness to break with his past detracts from the overall quality of this work. Nevertheless, this work is well written and will retain the reader's attention to the end.



3. I could not put down this book, and read it in two sittings. Wladyslaw Szpilman, the famed pianist and composer, describes his harrowing account of life under Nazi terror. As a Polish Jew, Szpilman was considered by the Nazis to be entirely subhuman, and it is a miracle he survived the persistent and random acts of violence that surrounded him. He was nearly sent to a death camp along with his five family members, and somehow was pulled off the Birkenau-bound train to a grim prospect of survival. The images in this book are harrowing, such as the depiction of the shattered skulls of little girls, victims of the Nazis' "preferred" method of killing children by picking them up by their legs and swinging them into a brick wall. Imagine the horror....Szpilman's account is so matter-of-fact at times that you wonder how he survived. The fact that he did is a testament of human endurance, but also the ways of fate. There were occasions when he survived simply by the luck of the draw in a Godless universe.



4. Why do I consider a first person account detailing the horrors of the Holocaust to be uplifting? The events described by the author are harrowing and nearly unbelieveable to the degree that I was astonished that the man, in the end, survives. Perhaps that is why I am so uplifted by this story. He survived. He defied evil by daring to live. He also dared to pick up the pieces of his shattered life and continue to live. He does this without any fanfare or obvious heroism. I think that is what makes this particular telling of the Holocaust so remarkable. The author writes it in such an unremarkable fashion that it forces you to sit up and take notice. By simply stating that the caramel was his 'family's last meal together' makes you pause to reflect on such an event. Beautifully written. Highly reccommended.
   
   As a side note, Roman Polanski's adaptation of this book is truely brilliant. Adrien Brody's portrayal of Szpilman is awe inspiring and heart wrenching to watch. Both men do the book and Szpilman's memory justice.



5. I don't have too much to add to the other reviewers; having seen the movie I had a pretty good idea what to expect.
   
   Probably the most interesting thing about the book version is the diary of a German officer who helped save Spilman. The officer's diary (from 1942-44) shows that he was aware of the Nazi extermination camps by mid-1942; he explained that most Jews were "so weak from starvation and misery that they couldn't offer any resistance." By December 1943, he knew that Germany would lose the war, but suggests that Germans would not revolt because "no one would risk his life by standing up to the Gestapo."

5 comments about Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror (Vintage).

1. This is a must for anyone Jew, Muslim gentile (like me) who despairs at the Israeli/Palestinian problem to be confirmed in the view that there are people of good will on both sides where common humanity exists but unfortunately frustrated by those in power who believe that force is the only way forward



2. This is a very well written book that grips you from the start and makes you want to keep reading to find out "what happened next" in the manner of successful fiction. The events outlined display a considerable amount of courage on the part of Goldberg, who stayed a few weeks in a Pakistani Madrasa, and repeatedly entered the Gaza strip and was alone among what were, officially, his enemies.
   
   While the author's need to see signs of hope as to the future of the Israeli-Palestinian situation via his friendship with his former Palestinian prisoner "Rafik" is constant throughout the book, many of the questions Goldberg raises throughout his journeys are destined to dead-ends because they are based on a perspective that has been subject to a considerable amount of editing. And, as the nature of any quest goes, if you don't ask the right questions, you don't get the right answers.
   
   Whereas the author's pursuit of these signs of hope, even in hostile territory, is admirable, his premise is not as impassive as the synopsis of the book wants us to believe; It tells us that, as a prison guard, Goldberg "realized that his prisoners were the future leaders of Palestine", hence "this was a unique opportunity to learn from them about themselves", but, when you get to that part of the book, Goldberg tells you that one of his tasks in prison (as a member of the military police) was to confiscate any and all signs of Palestinian national aspirations (flags, rocks in the shape of Israel, national songs). These were the pre-Oslo days, when a "Palestinian state" was unacceptable to Israel. And while Goldberg was genuinely curious about understanding his prisoners, he did not think they'd be "future leaders" of any state, as confiscating any signs of such aspirations testifies. It is very interesting to note how taking such liberties in shuffling around elements of the time-line for the sake of a stronger pitch in the synopsis mirrors what happened with the larger picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
   
   One of the questions the reader is inevitably lead to upon reading Goldberg's accounts of such confiscations in prison is:
   
   What drives one people to try and confiscate all signs of the identity of another people? Or, more accurately:
   
   How can a people base the security of their identity upon the elimination of that of another?
   
   In Goldberg's latest account of the conflict covering the last few years, he presents it more as one that has its origins in religious intolerance and Muslim extremism. It is ironic that Goldberg quotes Israeli writer "Amos Oz" at some point in his narrative, because it was precisely Oz that repeated that this was not a religious conflict, but a real estate one. While the rise of militant fanaticism in the Muslim world is an undeniable fact of considerable threat to many countries, recasting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as being caused by religious pathos is, again, a reshuffling of the story for the sake of a stronger pitch.
   
   Anyone who is interested in knowing more about what is going on in that unfortunate part of the world could benefit from the account of "Susan Nathan", a British Jewess who lived in an Arab village in Israel, in her book, "The Other Side of Israel", or "Emma Williams", a British doctor who lived and worked in Jerusalem, in her book "It's easier to reach Heaven than the end of the street, a Jerusalem memoir". Both provide some parts of the picture that were edited out of Goldberg's story, courageous as he may be.
   
   Some questions open doors to other questions that may well be very different from the ones the author intended, but which are the only ones that could bring the reader closer to an understanding of the real story.



3. When this book originally came out in 2006, its title was: Prisoners-A Muslim and a Jew across the Middle East Divide. When I received the book to review it had a new title: Prisoners-A Story of Friendship and Terror. I found this very interesting because the new title seemed more hopeful, a strong message woven throughout this book.
   
   Jeffrey Goldberg is the Washington correspondent of The New Yorker. Until recently, he served as the magazine's Middle East correspondent. Before joining The New Yorker in 2000, Goldberg covered the Middle East and Africa for The New York Times Magazine. He is also a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces.
   
   Prisoners is a memoir of his time in the Israeli Army. In 1990, during the first Palestinian uprising, Goldberg served as a prison guard in the largest prison in Israel. He decided early in his service that he would talk to the Palestinian prisoners, mostly out of curiosity but also because he thought it was possible to be friends with them. Rafiq, the prisoner and Fatah activist that he spent the most time with, was as he describes, "a bookish kind of guy who had some ironic distance from the essential absurdities of prison life." Despite their extreme differences, they began a dialogue in the prison that grew into an astonishing friendship--and now a remarkable book.
   
   Goldberg brings real faces to the war on both sides of the conflict, something we don't always get when reading about this topic. He believes this book is meant for anyone who is mystified by the issues in the Middle East. He hopes that, through this memoir he will explain to all sorts of readers why the Middle East is such a puzzling and troubling place.
   
   The message of his book is that it is not impossible--it is terribly difficult, but not impossible--to build a friendship with your enemy. Rafiq said it best: "If a million people in the Middle East could have the sort of friendship we have created--a tenuous, fraught friendship, but a friendship nonetheless--than the Middle East might become a better place." We can only hope.
   
   Armchair Interviews says: A thought-provoking story.



4. Brilliant...Prisoners is a stunningly personal, humorous and poignant memoir that is rare in its scope and reach. In the book, Goldberg deftly presents both his own breathtakingly honest and bittersweet life history as well as the story of his close friendship and kinship with Rafiq - a Palestinian prisoner he was once charged with guarding while in the Israeli army. This account of their conversation through the years explores the possibility of peace in an area of the world fraught with strife throughout the millennia.
   
   Goldberg is a seasoned journalist who masterfully presents the extremely complex situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians in a way that facilitates understanding and renders it accessible to everyone - from novices of the region to experts in geo-politics. Of note, he is fair-minded and even handed in his approach describing the tense conflict between the two sides. Goldberg's deep knowledge of and experience in the Middle East coupled with his evocative writing style produces an exciting and immensely satisfying read. Overall, Prisoners is at times hilarious and others heart-wrenching but ultimately it is a story of hope measured with an experienced and realistic perspective.



5. I read it in 2 nights. It is truly brilliantly perceptive and indescribably sad - he, like so many, see no solution, not really, despite his theme of coexistence. By now there's so much hatred on both sides, so much misunderstanding, so much blood shed unnecessarily, that any happy end is virtually impossible.
   Ruth Weiss, Author, Germany

5 comments about The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival.

1. I was unfamiliar with the Kindertransport that moved 10,000 Jewish children to safety from the Holocaust. This biography brings that event to life through the memories of Lisa Jura. At 14, her parents sent her to London and the book covers that wrenching journey and the next six years of her life. Growing up during the blitz in a refugee home with 31 children makes a fascinating book.
   Lisa's devotion to music weaves the story together as she strives towards her parents' dream. Becoming a concert pianist seems unachievable under the circumstances, but this touching biography details Lisa's progress towards that goal. This account has appeal for both adult and teen readers.
   I also recommend In The Shadow Of The Cathedral: Growing Up In Holland During WW II by Titia Bozuwa



2. author of Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family
   
   from the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
   August 30, 2002
   
   Vienna, 1938. In the city of Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and Strauss, 14-year-old musical prodigy Lisa Jura looks forward to a promising career as a concert pianist. Hitler has other plans. With the breaking of glass on Kristallnacht, Jura's dreams are shattered.
   
   Internationally celebrated concert pianist Mona Golabek, with journalist and poet Lee Cohen, has crafted a loving, lyrical tribute to her mother, Lisa Jura, in "The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival."
   
   Jura was one of 10,000 Jewish children saved from the Nazis by the British and sent on the Kindertransport to safety from Eastern Europe. Already being compared to "The Diary of Anne Frank," this simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting tale weaves together the stories that Golabek's mother told her about prewar Austria; the gut-wrenching separation from her family; life at the orphanage on Willesden Lane; and the power of music to help her survive.
   
   As Jura's mother, Malka, puts her on the train, she says the prophetic words that will sustain and inspire her daughter and future generations: "Hold on to your music. Let it be your best friend."
   
   In a world turned ugly, the beauty of music becomes Jura's strength, and, against tremendous odds, with the help and encouragement of the 30 other displaced children at the orphanage, she wins a scholarship to London's Royal Academy.
   
   "Each kid saw something in my mother's music that reminded them of what they had left behind in Czechoslovakia, in Austria, in Germany," says Golabek, a Grammy-nominated artist, "and that's what I tried to do in the story, not only to pay homage to my mother, but to all these kids and to their bravery."
   
   The book opens with Jura's tantalizing daydream of performing in a great concert hall and closes with the fulfillment of that dream, as she makes her debut before an exhilarated crowd. And in between, the pages burst with melody: Jura pounding the cadenza of the Grieg "Piano Concerto" to drown out the sounds of bombs during London's blitz, Jura visualizing Chopin fleeing a flaming Warsaw as she struggles with the somber coda of the "Ballade," Jura remembering her mother's Sabbath candles as she plays the solemn opening of Beethoven's "Pathetique."
   
   "My mom and her mother never cared if a piece is in C major. What really counts is the passion behind it, the image. If it's `Clair de Lune,' imagine the moon over a desert island. That imagination allowed her to survive the horrors of what she experienced, because a C-major chord will not inspire you through the horrors. It's the moonlight, the idea that maybe the composer wrote it for someone he loved. These things inflamed her imagination, and that's how she inflamed mine."
   
   And now Golabek's book will inflame the imagination of a whole new generation. The Milken Family Foundation, together with Facing History and Ourselves, an educational organization that teaches tolerance to 1 million students annually, are working with Golabek to bring the story to schools across the country by developing a companion curriculum guide.
   
   Plans are under way to launch the book in Austria, and make it available to teachers as part of the now mandatory four-year Holocaust education program for students.
   
   The saga of Golabek's 18-year struggle to get the story published is almost as harrowing as her mother's story itself. "It went through many, many writings; many, many ups and downs, starts and disappointments," Golabek says.
   
   Now the accolades and offers are pouring in. On Sept. 24, she will be an honored guest speaker at the California Governor's Conference for Women at the Long Beach Convention Center and will appear at Beth Am on Nov. 17 with her sister, pianist Renee Golabek-Kaye, and Jura's four grandchildren, all musicians: Michele, 16; Sarah, 14; Jonathan, 8; and Rachel, 7. Brandeis University will honor her at the Skirball Cultural Center next March 31.
   
   Last week Golabek was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition and was the subject of a feature story by Andy Meisler of the New York Times. In the planning stages is a concert next year co-sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the Austrian government. And, of course, Golabek is considering movie offers.
   
   On her syndicated radio show, "The Romantic Hours," which highlights stirring writings against a musical backdrop (Saturdays at 10 p.m., 105.1 FM), Golabek often quotes the poet Jean Paul Richter: "Life fades and withers behind us, but of our immortal and sacred soul all that remains is music."
   
   "That was a quote my mother taught me, and the whole reason why I wrote this book and why I created `The Romantic Hours' was that my mother felt through words and through music our souls would be immortalized."



3. This is one of my all-time favorite books. If you are a musician, you will fall in love with it. The story is inspiring and moving and will make you appreciate music to the greatest extent possible.



4. Full of history. Easy to follow. Great read for young and old alike.



5. This is a story which every parent should read to their children. Talk about the history of WW2 and discuss the extremes of humanity. A book which once read you will never forget.

5 comments about Ten Green Bottles: The True Story of One Family's Journey from War-torn Austria to the Ghettos of Shanghai.

1. The account of a Jewish familys' descent in Vienna through the Nazi hell to the foreign shores of Shanghai is interesting from an historical perspective. The writing is amateurish with the point of view jumping around and the verb tenses as well. It could have used a good editor.



2. The story of the blind hatred and inhumanity whipped up by the Nazis needs to be told - and told often. But it deserves a more nuanced telling than this single-dimensional presentation. This account is all bright colors (first quarter) and darkness (remainder), with little in between.
   What is particularly striking is that the narrator makes no effort to relate to the suffering of Shanghai's indigenous Chinese population. Her flat and parenthetical references to the pervasive poverty, disease and oppression reveal little or no interest in the historical or social context that created such dreadful conditions, not to mention any empathy with the people so afflicted. Its detachment is disturbing. Could it be that one's humanity is so degraded by abuse that one cannot see beyond one's own suffering? Perhaps, but without any attempt at explanation it comes across as heartless indifference.
   As a tribute by a daughter to a mother and a family who endured hideous persecution the book is a worthy effort. But in providing any real insights it falls sadly short.



3. I thoroughly enjoyed "Ten Green Bottles". Unlike other books on Shanghai of that period, I particularly relished the intimate glimpse of the extreme wealth and decadence that was ongoing alongside the abject poverty of the immigrants that fled Europe. Much is written here of how people of many nations with unimaginable wealth made Shanghai their "sumptuous playground" between the stench and filth of the city.
   
   In particular, the author's description of the Bolero Club through the eyes of Nini, who worked as a hostess there, was so exciting and so descriptive and so alive that I was sure I was in the room with some of the most powerful men and glamorous women of the time. Her detailed description of the opium den next door, a "grand salon" established exclusively for the very rich, is breathtaking.
   
   This book is a must read for anyone who wants to live the Shanghai of World War II from its lows to its highs.



4. This story about the experiences of a Viennese Jewish family in Shanghai perfectly fulfills two raison d'etre of books - on the one hand it allows the reader to enter a time-warp machine and be transplanted to another time and another place and vicariously live through the emotional upheavals, the smells, sights, sounds and most importantly the feelings of fear, frustration, Angst and yes, fortunately also joy, of the main characters. Vivian Kaplan is a master of setting the scene and allowing the reader to slip into the protagonist's skin. I have lived and worked in Vienna and also in Northern China (albeit at a much later time) and Vivian's writing rings true. The chapters in the book are like 3-D images conjured up for the reader (and would make a very gripping screenplay). The other raison d'etre of books is to preserve and hand down important happenings and narrate them in a gripping and thought-provoking manner. The manner in which the Jews in Austria and elsewhere were treated by an Austrian madman who managed to come to power in Germany should never be forgotten. More importantly, we all need to be vigilant that such events happen less and less frequently in the history of humankind. Although familiar with the story of displaced Jews from German-speaking countries as I (like the author) am offspring, I was unable to put down the book. What Nini Karpel's mother had to experience in one short lifetime is more than most people should have to live through. The book also helped me understand the initial inertia of many Jews in Vienna to the anti-Semitic flare-up in the 1920s and 30s. "Oh, we've seen this many times, let's just lie low and wait for it to blow over". Writing in the present tense made the story more immediate. However, despite the fact that the book had its share of gruesome scenes, overall the manner in which Nini viewed the world seemed overly rosy-colored and syrupy sweet. The naive tone that permeates the book distracts from the serious situation in which these refugees find themselves. Even a five-year old would know better than to state 'we are awed by the changes in the baby within his first year. Every day he seems to learn some new word...' p.5. Should the book get reprinted, I suggest a German-speaking editor correct some of the German words. The great Ferris wheel in Vienna is no 'Reisenrad' p.77 and the 'Fuhrer' should be spelled 'Fuehrer'. But overall we are better off for having another story capture the senseless suffering human beings will inflict upon one another.



5. 
   Ten Green Bottles is one of the most powerful, emotional, fascinating and beautifully written books I have ever read. Where has this author been?
   
   The story begins in the early 1920s in Vienna where a five year old Jewish girl, called Nini, begins to experience what it is to be the youngest of three sisters. It is written in Nini's voice and throughout the book you seem to live every moment of her life as if you were in her skin. You laugh, cry, feel and experience everything that happens to her as if it were happening to you, yet the book is non-fiction.
   
   The story tells of her life in a growing family and the hardships of her mother in raising her children and carrying on their business after her father's death. As Nini grows into her teenage years, your senses are filled with the excitement of Vienna and the thrill of skiing in the mountains nearby. Then the Nazis come and everything changes.
   
   As Jews are now considered vermin, they must flee the city or they will surely die. With the help of a gentile lawyer they are able to leave Vienna for Shanghai. On arriving in this no-man's land with almost no money, they find themselves in the middle of another war between China and Japan. Living in squalor and trying to survive, their life is made even more miserable. Japan, an ally of Germany, forces them and about 20,000 other Jews into a small ghetto with over 100,000 of the poorest Chinese. The story tells of their life and the life of the Jewish community as they try to make it through to the end of the war under the most deplorable conditions imaginable. They are eventually liberated by the Americans and stay until the Communist takeover in the late 1940s when they leave. The story ends with their exceptionally well written arrival in the white winter of Canada where they do not have to fear anymore.
   
   I read a lot and to me this book was a literary masterpiece. I also learned about a very interesting part of the Holocaust that I had not known.

5 comments about The Jew Store.

1. A wonderful story, thoroughly enjoyed, and similar to my family history. The book was not, however, well written.



2. The Jew Store was both charming and telling. The author was insightful, but always kind and her humor was gentle.



3. This is an exquisitely written memoir that reads like fiction. What a talent to take what is true and create a story! In the 1920's, my grandparents ran a "Jew store" in Lawrenceville, Virgina, but left after a year during which the KKK made it known they were unwelcome. My grandfather became a "Jew peddler" in North Carolina, and much of this story rang true with the tales I was told as a child. Residents looked on the "Jew peddler" with suspicion, but also with awe because he brought the big city with him. He was expected to be sophisticated; his opinions were taken seriously. During the Great Depression, one North Caroina farmer gave his daughter to my grandfather because she was starving. He took her home to Norfolk, Virginia, to raise with his own five children, and a life-long relationship ensued.
   
   My book club enjoyed this book and had a lively discussion.



4. This was a definite surprise me novel. I picked it up for no other reason than the shocking title. This has become one of my favorite books, and she, a favored writer. I love how she brings the people from her childhood to life in the reader's mind, the language, the sayings, a delightful Southern Yiddish flavor. This book has been passed among friends and allowed us to have an interesting discussion with 3 generations of Southern women.



5. The authenticity of detail hit me over and again, describing not only how it felt to be Jewish in white anglo-saxon Prodestant Tennessee, but the way everyone was: open armed but not altogether open minded, graciously phrasing back-talk, helpful when you least expected it, back-stabbing the same way, and sugar-coating every topic but money. When it came to money, you didn't pay protection after the fact, like industrial cities; you first worked for permission. Fabulously The Jew Store tells this tale! True to my own memory is the white woman whose lemon merangue pie was acclaimed, only it was her cook's. The cook, called that but doing cleaning, gardening, child rearing, and everyting else. Learning to listen backwards if you wanted to know what someone was actually saying, as in "we're so glad you came over and didn't even call!" The sugar-coated talk from mean, angry men. The social standing that harked to who-knew-where... This was the small mill town I grew up in in NC, too. It produced the fragile sounding Southern-belle diction that was good for date bait 'up north,' as her daughter found out; but that belied the resolve of strong, smart women with wonderful senses of humor, as shown in her characters. Anyone who grew up in a small mill town in the South prior to -- say 1970 --- met plenty of folks just like these. How glorious to have this touching volume of remembrances.

5 comments about A Walker in the City.

1. Ditching college class one day, I went to the local public library, plucked a random book from the shelf and found that it was, "Walker in the City." I knew nothing about Kazin and didn't especially enjoy memoir, but I checked out the book and took it home. There, Kazin drew me in, one page after another, into the world of Brownsville, and the dreams of the world beyond. I could relate to his need to describe it all, to leave not one stone unturned in his cataloging of memory. I felt that he wrote in obedience, that his describing was of duty, that writing this book was a mission; that the story of this place and people, and his processing of it, had to be told. I have since bought and given away several copies of this memoir. It is a gem, and each time I read it is only slightly less delightful than the last.



2. A Walker in the City seems like a book that I should like. Critically acclaimed and lauded, i expected it would be wonderful. Granted, Kazin has a way with words and description unlike most, however, "A Walker" simply bored me. Reading it in comparison to McCourts Angela's Ashes for a college course, I can't help but wish Kazin had resisted the temptation to describe everything in detail and tell us more about the people. He ends the book talking about a romantic relationship, yet tells nothing of the girl, simply the reservoir and park in which they walked. I can't help but almost be angry that he seems to have no value for human relationships, he rather bury his nose in a book or stare at a brick wall on the street. I see this book as missing the mark, having potential and good qualities but overall being an overdramatic, over-emotional boring description of his emotions and surroundings. "give me a break"



3. I first read A WALKER IN THE CITY as an adolescent, and the book impressed me, in that mysterious way that things that we know "should" impress us can do.
   
   I re-read WALKER as an adult and, by modern standards, I think that it is overrated.
   
   It is long and rambling and self-indulgent.
   
   By rights, A WALKER IN THE CITY should have resonated for me, since my own father had grown up in Brownsville, exactly the same neighborhood that author Alfred Kazin describes, and at virtually the same time.
   
   Yet I found little about Brownsville in this dreary memoir; it simply explores the rather maudlin sentiments of the young Kazin. Swifty Lazar, the late literary agent who was renowned for representing men of letters, as opposed to being a man of letters himself, had offered a far more compelling description of life in that same Brownsville in his own memoir.
   
   No, WALKER only is about Kazin and his adolescent imagination, his theories about those who lived in places other than Brownsville (to wit, "the city") and about his personal (and intensely idiosynchratic, if not peculiar) yearnings.
   
   There are points in which he uses Yiddish without offering a translation, and even a section in which he lapses into high-school French, again with no translation. His use of language often seems strained and self-conscious, such as using the word "plash" as--I think--a synonym for "splash."
   
   Insofar as much of the book had been printed in contemporary magazines as essays, the format here has cobbled together several essays into a memoir. In consequence, this memoir could have used better editing, since things that are fully explained on their first mention do not need the identical explanations further into the book; such styling would be reasonable in a series of magazine pieces, but not in a volume offered as a cohesive work.
   
   I cannot help wondering whether A WALKER IN THE CITY, first published in 1946, would be as enthusiastically received if it first saw print today. It strikes me as the literary equivalent of the Emperor's new clothes.



4. Alfred Kazin's eminently readable memoir of his childhood and adolescent life growing up in a Jewish enclave in New York City during the early decades of the twentieth century, offer certain insight into the realities of the cityscape but most enjoyably his personality. The first lines - 'Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away' - are not mere platitudes, but rather establish the style of the book and the indelible connection between the author and the city. Kazin at times meanders with his storytelling and rememberances of the textures of the city, of Brownsville and it's inhabitants, but like any good writer who has developed a truly authentic voice, he redraws the reader into the narrative, into himself. And for Kazin - and vicariously for the reader - the city, his experiences of Brownsville, and the inhabitants are bound into a seamless whole. Kazin seems at his best when he parrots the coyly yearning adolescent male. I couldn't help but smile at one particular scene in which he described an older, married, and forlorn woman, who's mysticism piqued his youthful interest. 'How did you address your shameful secret love when she walked into a kitchen, and sat down with you, and smiled, smiled nervously, never fitting herself to the great design?' the sly youth pondered, for in his imagination, which Leo Tolstoy too inhabited, she was his Anna. This scene was one of several anecdotes that I found myself smiling at as I read, enjoying the author's wit, prose, and storytelling ability.
   If one reads for the love of language and for the imagination, this book will not disappoint.



5. In the 1940s, Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) revisited his Brooklyn childhood in the short yet elegant memoir, A WALKER IN THE CITY. It is a stunning literary work, with the added bonus of getting a rare close-up view of a particular culture in a particular time and place that might otherwise be lost in oblivion.
   
   The culture is the Yiddish enclave of the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, circa 1920s and the coming of the Great Depression. To the young boy, it was the entire planet, one that throbbed with the food, language and traditions of old world immigrants who want their children to preserve their ways but avail American education. The neighborhood's minorities include the Italian peddlers, the gentile school principal, and the African American population that is beginning to settle at the edges, on Livonia Avenue. It is a time of change: in the streets there are Zionist, Socialist, Communist, and union proclamations. Young women are bewildering their elders with their independence and new thoughts on marriage. As Kazin grows older, he begins to experience "the beyond" as well: the world brought in by films and literature, the wonders of "the city" (Manhattan), the mysteries of the human condition.
   
   The telling of his story is golden. It's as if Kazin is a cinematographer, his prose growing more colorful as he slips from a walk in the present back into memory. He plays to all the senses with vivid imagery. His rhythmic prose is effortlessly lyrical. So precise is his description, that when I looked up a map of Brooklyn, the streets he named are all exactly where he laid them out in my mind.

5 comments about I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years.

1. One should read this book only after the first volume covering the years 1933-41. The story of Victor & Eva's survival of detention in the Jews' house, the Dresden bombing and subsequent wanderings stunned me. But Victor's courage in continuing his secret diary for 12 years comes through - as does his humanity ad personal growth.
   
   The diary jotting sryle means you pick it up and read a section at a time, but you will most likely be drawn into finishing it within a short time.



2. And I will get the other years of this author's diary. This is not a fast paced WWII battle book; this is the diary of a poor soul who had to live through every moment of a terrible regime, to endure even more when he thought he'd reached his limit. If you're interested in what it was like to live day to day in Hitler's Germany (as a Jew or a gentile)--to understand what it was like to watch it begin and grow and eventually implode--this is an excellent read. I would say it is for those deeply interested in the psychology of the times; not a passing interest. I'll get the other books and read them in order of the years they cover. I really want to understand how the Third Reich could ever BE.



3. This is actually the second volume of Klemperer's diaries, published in two volumes. I highly recommend that you buy both volumes as a set and read from the beginning how a bureaucratic mindset advanced towards ultimate evil.
   
   In the end, Klemperer's diary doesn't fully answer the haunting question, "How could it have happened?" But you will find some definitive answers here to questions that Holocaust scholars have debated over the years.
   
   For example, Klemperer's experience answers the charge that virtually all Aryan Germans knew from the beginning exactly what the Third Reich's intentions were towards the Jews. Klemperer's actual interactions stand as refutation of this blanket indictment. Often when he visited Aryan acquaintances to conduct business - he would then jovially be invited to come back that evening for schnapps. Klemperer had to explain that he couldn't come back later for schnapps - that as a Jew, he was prohibited from boarding any vehicle of public transportation after 6:00 PM, that he had a general curfew, and that of course, he had long since been banned from owning his own car.
   
   Klemperer was always circumspect in recounting these laws he labored under to his "Semitophile" acquaintances. (That's an awkward translation of the German phrase Klemperer probably used to refer to Aryans who were sympathetic to Jews. But it is perhaps the only word that was available to Martin Chalmers, who otherwise has produced a generally fluid translation of Klemperer's journals.) At any rate, Klemperer was careful never to appear too whining or too critical of the restrictions placed on him. He didn't want to alienate these Aryan allies. Nevertheless, he repeatedly found himself in the position of having to enlighten them about the government's latest round of restrictions. And his listeners were almost always genuinely surprised to hear about these laws. Their ignorance in the face of all the anti-Semitic propaganda blared daily from radios, blazoned from the newspapers, seemed to be more a function of people's tendency towards plodding self-preoccupation than an indication of any active complicity with the advancing evil.
   
   I think you'll find that Klemperer's account also carries a very relevant warning to us in our current pursuit of terrorists at all costs. Klemperer survived the early rounds of call-ups for the concentration camps because he was a decorated World War I hero, and because he was married to an Aryan. For these reasons, he was given some initial grudging dispensation from the worst Nazi reprisals. However as the War progressed, his past service to Germany and his Aryan affiliation came to count for less and less. Finally his number was up and he, along with the last handful of Jews remaining around Dresden, were scheduled for transport. The only thing that saved him was the Allied bombing of Dresden. Most local Nazi records were destroyed in this notorious bombardment. So Klemperer and his wife, having survived the bombing, were also able to survive those last most brutal months of the Nazi regime by assuming new identities and wandering through the German countryside from town to town, passing themselves off as a typical displaced Aryan couple. If the Nazis' meticulous records (documenting family lineages and confirming who was where) had remained intact, Klemperer would certainly have been deported to the gas chambers.
   
   So if you don't already have doubts about the increasing surveillance measures being taken in the U.S., presumably to guard against terrorists and other "evildoers" - reading these journals will give you pause. One of the lessons of Klemperer's journal is how tyranny proceeds by little increments of paperwork. Its power is in keeping tabs.
   
   Klemperer risked his life to write the entries in these journals, because it eventually became a capital crime for a Jew to possess paper or any pen/pencil. So it feels almost sacrilegious to make any criticism of this supremely brave and literate account. However I do have one small criticism. And that is Klemperer's common masculine tendency to put his wife in the background of his life. Eva Klemperer comes off in the diary as a shadowy adjunct to the importance of Victor's work producing these pages.
   
   She is mentioned, more frequently in the first volume of the diaries, but this mention is usually limited to reports of the fact that she had another hysterical fit that day, or that she engaged Victor in another round of angry lamentation, or that she suffered some physical malady. He does acknowledge her collaborative bravery. She also risked her life every time she smuggled the pages of his work out of their small assigned apartment into the hands of friends for safekeeping. But we never directly hear Eva's voice in all this. The reader is only left to guess at the actual substance of her outbursts.
   
   You will probably feel impelled to read between the lines to flesh her out. Perhaps Eva wasn't the prettiest girl in school, so she took the one marriage proposal that came her way. She married the intellectually accomplished Victor. Victor was available because Aryan prejudice, even in those early years, already limited him socially. We can imagine her outbursts of recrimination as the Nazi noose grew tighter around their yoked necks. Why did you have to be Jewish? Why have you dragged me down with you? I could have led such a happy life. And instead, look at me - scrounging for rotten potatoes, under constant threat of beatings and death - and all because of you!
   
   If only Eva had written her own diary, we might have had some additional fascinating insights into why and how a couple stays together under such trying circumstances. We might have gained a greater understanding of the ties of love and the chains of having nowhere else to go. As it is, we have only Victor's side of the story. But that is a powerful, must-read insight into how tyranny grows, brick-by-brick, petty edict by petty edict.



4. Because my friends all know what a book-hound I am, people often ask me what my all-time favorite book is. Admittedly the answer to this would change over time, but, at present, "I Will Bear Witness" is the one that first pops into my mind.
   
   I found this very personal account of the days and nights of a German Jewish man--an inoffensive and formerly rather conservative German nationalist academic married to a Gentile--during the Nazi terror regime to be absolutely breathtaking. Indeed, I was so caught up in his account that I took an unexpected day of vacation from work just to not interrupt my reading once I had started.
   
   Further, I found myself sprawled on my bed, as is sometimes customary with me, surrounded by ancillary books, atlases, and maps --a behavior that signifies I'm reading a book that has utterly gripped me and a book that is expanding my horizons.
   
   Klemperer was (just barely) saved from being sent to a concentration camp due to his marriage to a non-Jew. However, he lived every day under the threat of torture and deportation to a camp and his journal tells of the years of grinding anxiety over his fate and the fate of his wife, friends, and relatives-many of whom were taken. It also speaks to the minutiae of life under the Nazi's--such things as their penchant for legalisms to justify their treatment of the Jews embodied in his incessant embroilment in Nazi demands that he take part in the legalisms of their confiscation of his property. Moreover, as the war draws to a close, he draws a stunning portrait of life as a war refugee--a picture that applies to war refugees the world over throughout time.
   
   Kudos to those who elevated this book to number one among the history choices-it deserves it and in my mind deserves even more.



5. Victor Klemperer's diary of the years of the Hitler dictatorship and his recording of the day-to-day lives of the Jews of Dresden, his thoughtful and insightful commentary on the methods (particularly the language of the propaganda) of the Third Reich, the heart-wrenching stories of those who were taken away never to be seen again, his experience in the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 and his miraculous journey home should be required reading for everyone about the horrors of tyranny and war. It is also a tribute to the true human spirit and the power of the intellect. Klemperer never lost his determination to live, despite all the blows of terror that were aimed at him, his family, and his friends. That he believed there was something to live for--in the midst of utter barbarity--should inspire all of us to work for a better world. It did me.
   
   A remarkable record of a dark time. Reading it gives one the courage to carry on in the dark times that have come again.

5 comments about Memoirs of Glueckel of Hameln.

1. It is a privilege to read a personal memoir of an inhabitant of 17th-century Germany. I have read "history books" about this period, but Glueckel's memoir tells me how it felt to be actually present. Glueckel is a good writer, although I'm sure the translator also deserves some of the credit.



2. Gluckel of Hameln is the diary of a frum woman from the 1600's. We don't have any real information from this period except from some unavailable books of Rabbi Yaakov Emden. In her diary, she speaks of events of life, death, the Plague, Shabsai Tzvi, and how she raised her family during this hard time in Jewish History.
   This version of the book come in paperback and is annotated. The translation from the original version is pretty good considering that some words don't translate well from one language to another. The introduction gives some of her story away but important to read to understand her approach in writing this diary.
   I bought this book and have given it to my best friends for motivational and historical reading. BUY THIS BOOK!



3. Anyone wanting to get a profound insight into the life of Jews in Germany during the 17th Century as told with true life experiences by an outstanding mother, wife and businesswoman of the time, must read this book. My wife and I bought two so that we could read and discuss every paragraph together, and we really got caught up in the emotions and life experiences of this era in Jewish and German history. Told in simple language and with profound true life experiences and deep religious belief, as only this extraordinary Jewess could have transposed us to this era and the every day life and the hardships and tribulations of German Jews already then.



4. Fascinating description of an educated Jewish woman's life in the 1600's with an amazing amount of travel in Northern Europe pertaining to family matters and business. It was not a small world by any means. She was a bit effusive in her thanks and acceptance of her life with moralising, but her description of her life is outstanding.



5. Almost all of the human beings who have lived on this earth have left behind no name or story. This is also true about the vast majority of Jews even when the Jews are a people for whom remembrance is a sacred act. The great great majority of Jews who have lived on this planet too have no names and no stories.
   Thus the memoir of Gluckel of Hameln is so welcome .In it she tells the story of her family, her struggling as a widow to make a living , to marry off the eleven surviving of her fourteen children. She tells too something of the incredibly difficult and limited world she lived in, and of the special difficulties Jews had to contend with to remain alive. Gluckel may go into too much detail and not be the greatest writer in the world but she certainly is a person of tremendous moxie, courageous, dedication , insight . How wonderful it would be if we could have the stories of many others of great value who lived, gave to the world and then passed from it as if they were not here at all. This is a well- worth reading document of both historical and human significance

5 comments about No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War.

1. Born into a comfortable home in Krakow, Poland during the 1930s, Hanusia finds her childhood abruptly ripped from her at age five, when she must flee from the Nazis simply because she is a Jew. Hanusia's father left in the middle of the night, and no one has heard from him since; while her mother is trying to maintain a job under false papers. Young Hanusia's only got her brother, two years younger, and her beloved nanny, Niania.
   
   When leaving the city for the countryside stops being a refuge for the children, Niania decides to take them to the remote village where she grew up. Thus, the next few years are spent, wandering the countryside to barter for food and struggling to survive day to day.
   
   Eventually, the children's luck runs out. Hanusia is ten and her brother eight when they are taken on a Nazi transport to a concentration camp. Yet despite the horrors, something or someone continues to look out for them -- and Hanusia, who has long considered herself partially Catholic, thanks to Niania's influence -- couldn't really say which faith is keeping her alive.
   
   After the war, Hanusia's tuberculosis lands her in Sweden, a beautiful land of plenty where she and her brother are eventually reunited with their parents and given a chance for a new life. Yet how does a person get past such horrors, especially when she scarcely remembers what it was like to live otherwise? How does a person even begin to live again with parents she scarcely remembers?
   
   Throughout this book, Lobel's voice is simple, clearly that of the child she was -- no matter what obstacles tried to take that from her. She states things as she sees them, and at no point does she appear to feel sorry for herself. Instead, young Hanusia is an inspiration to us all.



2. This book is a tragic adventure. Anita Lobel recalls the arrival of the Nazis and the end of her childhood as she knew it. I was thankful this book was a fast read, the suspense of what would happen to Lobel and her brother was too much at times. The writing is beautiful and appropriate for young readers as well as adults. Beautiful photos.



3. Imagine playing hide-and seek, but you are hiding from the German Nazis because you are illegal. Every time they get close to you, a new hiding spot must be found, or your life will be put on the line. During the Holocaust, young Hanusiu played by these rules everyday. Told from a child's point of view, No Pretty Pictures is the memoir of Anita Lobel, earlier called Hanusiu, and her journey through the secrets, tears, and sacrifices of the Holocaust. Ms. Lobel did an amazing job describing everything that happened to her in those fatal years. One part that held excruciating description was when Hanusiu was forced into her first Concentration Camp. I felt as though I was walking into the camp alongside Hanusiu. The other prisoners, barracks, nervousness, and overall feeling of pain were expressed in a way that I cannot believe was seen through a child's eyes. Another major event that took place was when Hanusiu was diagnosed with tuberculosis after she had been rescued. She was forced to stay in a sanatorium for about a year and a half to cure the chronic disease. I could feel her hope and insecurities as each day passed, knowing that she might never get out. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a clear picture of what happened during the Holocaust, supported with lots of description, and seen through a true survivor's eyes.



4. Imagine playing hide-and seek, but you are hiding from the German Nazis because you are illegal. Every time they get close to you, a new hiding spot must be found, or your life will be put on the line. During the Holocaust, young Hanusiu played by these rules everyday. Told from a child's point of view, No Pretty Pictures is the memoir of Anita Lobel, earlier called Hanusiu, and her journey through the secrets, tears, and sacrifices of the Holocaust. Ms. Lobel did an amazing job describing everything that happened to her in those fatal years. One part that held excruciating description was when Hanusiu was forced into her first Concentration Camp. I felt as though I was walking into the camp alongside Hanusiu. The other prisoners, barracks, nervousness, and overall feeling of pain were expressed in a way that I cannot believe was seen through a child's eyes. Another major event that took place was when Hanusiu was diagnosed with tuberculosis after she had been rescued. She was forced to stay in a sanatorium for about a year and a half to cure the chronic disease. I could feel her hope and insecurities as each day passed, knowing that she might never get out. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a clear picture of what happened during the Holocaust, supported with lots of description, and seen through a true survivor's eyes.



5. Casey Anderson
   Book Review
   
   The sad and hard story of Anita, she lived in Poland. To start off the sadness in the beginning Anita her brother and the rest of the family were almost caught by the Nazi's buy they hid, they were sadly robbed of almost all there possessions. They had finally had to leave there house and go to the ghetto. They say, "The word ghetto was only a word to them", I think that means that they had never thought of leaving and going into the ghetto, it was like shock. They try to convert into Catholics by their first communion but it was said back then that a Jews sin is far worse than a Catholics. This was bad and times were getting tighter (the Germans were catching on to them).They were finally captured and taken to a camp where they had to work with low food and march a lot. They stayed there for many years and started to lose there hopes especially when there niania (there nanny) died after being
   beaten. Luckily though out of all of the thousands of people were caught many Red Cross busses had come to take them away from the Nazi's and into Sweden. But now she has moved to America and when somebody asked where she's from she will always say, "I am an American and proud of it". This book was very well written but didn't have to much detail on the backgrounds of there lives.