No comments about Chamberet: Recollections from an Ordinary Childhood.

2 comments about Not the Germans Alone: A Son's Search for the Truth of Vichy (Memoir Holocaust Studies).

1. This is a very beautiful and honest book about what happened to the Jews in France during WWII. It gives rare details about the French quiet acceptance of the deportation of Jews. It also reveals how difficult it is to get basic information from the French archives 50 years after the facts.

   A must read for everybody who desires to know.




2. How does it feel to be left alone as a seven year old. Your mother is taken by the authorities and your father is away in an interment camp and you are left in a cherry orchard in southern France. Isaac Levendel captures his feelings and shares them with us in his spell binding book, "Not The Germans Alone" published by Northwestern University Press (ISBN 0-8101-1663-4).. The amazing reality of the roundups after the invasion of Normandy rings with the madness of the Germans and the French establishment. Levendel gives us insights into the workings of Vichy France and the large amount of collaboration. While we were led to believe that most French were in the resistance, Levendel's book makes it clear that very few Frenchmen were in the underground and very few Frenchmen helped Jews escape the Nazis. Those few that risked their lives were simple people acting honorably. What I found most interesting is the description of his emotions about his mother and the description of her actions are sometimes inconsistent. He shows her virtues and her flaws. He writes about her love, her intelligence, her caring, her stubbornness, her bad judgement in not fleeing sooner, her mistake not taking all her money with her, and then going back to get it. I got the whole picture of her and that makes the book rich and touching. Levendel describes the peasant family that adopted him. They were heroes who risked their lives to help. Some scatological material gives us an earthy feeling of these people struggling to feed themselves as they helped others and thought nothing of it. They were truly pious. l loved how Levendel writes about his experience during allied bombings, "The bombardment did not feel or sound like it does in the movies. The heavy smoke smelled like dust and fire. The explosions were much more violent that I expected. The earth trembled under my body, and I could feel the shock wave of the explosions on my neck and chest, as if the bombing were happening inside my shirt. There was nowhere to hide. My mother had reached the limits of her power and could do nothing more to help me." The tracing of the official Vichy documents to verify what really happened is itself a real mystery story.

No comments about THE SPRING OF '31: A Kid's View of the Great Depression.

2 comments about Remembering Childhood in the Middle East: Memoirs from a Century of Change.

1. this is an excellent book and has the memoirs of a large range of individuals from the middle east. Easy to read and understand



2. During a five year assignment in Cairo (1961-1966) as head of the U.S. Embassy cultural and information programs I naturall tried to learn as much as I could about our audiences but I never saw an account of growing up in Egypt or nearby nations until this one. Elizabeth Fernea and her husband have lived in intimate contact with their peoples from the swamps of eastern Iraq to the bazaars of Morocco. She has a gift for describing her surroundings. Here she has assembled the memories of a panoply of individuals from every walk of life from royalty to villager during the momentous changes of the 20th Century.

No comments about Chantemesle: A Normandy Childhood.

2 comments about The Hooligan's Return: A Memoir.

1. This is a wonderful, if difficult book. It cronicles the author's life. Norman Manea suffered from both the Holocaust and Communism. Being Jewish, he and his family were deported during the Second World War to a concentration camp set up by Romania's fascist regime (General Ion Antonescu, Hitler's ally) in Transnistria, where several hundred thousand Jews were imprisoned and died in horrible circumstances. Luckily he survived the KZ and returned to Romania. Later on, when he had become a writer, he was declared enemy of the state and a 'hooligan' by Romania's Communists, because he had dared criticize the antisemitic government in an article. (Another fascinating Romanian-Jewish writer, Mihail Sebastian (see his Jurnal) was described as a 'hooligan' by antisemits in a literary scandal back in the 30's - the term has deep connotations for Manea). His relationship to his homeland remained troubled even after he left Romania in the 80's, settling down in New York as a professor for literature (he teaches at Bard College). Although he is one of Romania's best writers, his country's literary elite treats him with a certain embarassment. He can be compared in this respect to Imre Kertesz's relationship with Hungary.
   I liked this book not only because of all the detailed, multi-faceted and subtle description of these events, but also because it is an honest and selfironical autobiography. Manea is a reluctant autobiographer. My feeling is that he wrote this book out of duty; not to brag about his past, rather to pay tribute to those he loved and to remind the world of the terrible journey he has been through - a very typical journey for Jews and many East Europeans in the 20th century...

   P.S. If this book is superfluous, then so are the books by e.g. Anne Frank, Primo Levy and Mihail Sebastian. Good luck in burning them!




2. Francine Prose's blurb says it all: check it out on the inside cover of this book. THR is a multi-layered memoir that does not always proceed in chronological fashion. This story of a Romanian exile's return to his homeland is more substantial and real than Romanian-born writer Andrei Codrescu (who changed his surname from Perlmutter to "Codrescu," probably to appear more exotic in the US). When Norman Manea fears encountering the staff at the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, he has REAL reason to, unlike the poseur "Codrescu," who likes to fancy himself a revolutionary. In 1992, Manea penned a controversial essay on M. Eliad, a conflicted man whose relations with Romania's ultranational Iron Guard caused him much intrapersonal conflict. Manea also blew the whistle then on the RO community in chicago where a significant community of IG sympathizers still carry the flame today. In fact, he intimates, there may yet be a connection between the IG/Chicago Legionnaires and the Securitate in RO even today. Dangerous stuff even in these enlightened times some 60+ years later after the changing of the fascist/communistic guard in RO. Debates of this type go on in all eastern European countries, as they begin to sort thru their messy post-fascist/post-communist pasts; combine this with the added and ironical baggage of having many former Party leaders morph into "democratic" leaders. Absurdity never dies. Manea inspires his readers to delve into the works of other RO writers like Cioran, Paul Celan, I. Culianu, Petru Cretia...so Francine Prose sums things up neatly with her observation that "THR operates on so many levels that finally, it eludes all classification." Well said.

No comments about Hangchow, My Home: Growing Up in Heaven Below.

1 comments about Ghosts Of Kilrush.

1. What a great read, particularly for people that left Ireland during the emmigration wave of the 1940's to the 1960's. There is a supporting website at http://www.ghostsofkilrush.com/newbook.

No comments about Memoirs of a Lightkeeper's Son.

No comments about A Lost Childhood.