No comments about Scuds: A Teenage Jewish Refugee in Nazi-occupied Holland.

4 comments about Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind The List.

1. The historical Oskar Schindler is much more complex than the charming rogue portrayed in the "Schindler's List" of film and novel. In this definative new biography, Mr. Crowe has done impressive research in uncovering new archives and interviews to depict the Nazi spy/businessman who became a "righteous gentile" in saving Jews from certain death during World War II. Mr. Crowe is a Holocaust historian who has documented other Nazi atrocities in his 1996 work, "A History of the Gypies in Eastern Europe and Russia."
   
   The reader will be surprised to learn that Oskar Schindler had nothing to do with the creation of the life-giving lists that gave the title to the film by Steven Spielberg and the book by Thomas Keneally. Schnidler was in prison briefly when the lists were created by other persons. This does not diminished the other heroic acts that Schindler and his wife performed to save the Jews they came in contact with during the final two years of the World War II. He spent his war-profiteering fortune on bribes and supplies for those Jews in his care.
   
   It is sad that in the the madness of the Holocaust Oskar Schindler found the only success of his life. After the war, it was all downhill for the alcoholic womanizer who died in poverty in 1974. The book is very well-written and will interest those readers who desire to know what was the reality behind Schindler's List.



2. Amazing, fascinating, horrifying and sad is the story of Oscar Schindler, Emilie and others, as written in David M Crowe's well researched and easily readable biography. Oscar evolved into a deeply good good man, with great skill, courage and sharp wit, who flaws were also in many ways his strong points it seems to me in achieving what he did, and was an immensely admirable person. And it is sad that brilliant nice people don't usually get what they deserve, as loss of health and tragic failures after the war were the last things he deserved.
   There are a lot of horrible events and people described in this book, but also acts of humanity, kindness and braveness by many in the Oscar Schindler story, those three traits in particular summing up Oscar. There are more than a few instances of the Nazi hypocracies and madness, being used against them as they are outwitted in this story. An amazing and moving story.
   It's true that there's a lot of detail in this book and it can be hard going to keep up with it all, but i found the subject matter of Schindler enough to more than motivate me to keep turning the pages. One of the best sections of the book was Oscar's meeting in budapest i think it was, with aid organisation representatives for jews in occupied europe. Here you get a chance to discover what Oscar's thoughts were in relation to the war, holocaust and where he was at in action amongst it all. There is a lot of other detail in the book, not so involving, but the holocaust was a huge bureaucratic operation and apart from that, there weren't too many people with the liberty to document or concentrate on individual coming and goings, in the new cut throat order of the glorious third reich. So a lot of the superfluous information not directly relating to Oscars' daily life, is both understandably from a research point of view and also is relevant because this is precisely the world that Oscar was operating in.
   I think the author has done a great job on bringing us a biography on a man whos life and good deeds, never really got the reward they deserved(which is why life is as it is!) and because Oscar remained relatively obscure, much of his life details just wern't important enough for anyone to record for prosperities sake. Mr Crowe is more critical of Oscar than i feel he should be, for example, he disaproves when Oscar tell's the afore mentioned agents in Budapest that they must admit, in the intellectual realm the jew is really a dangerous competitor for the nazis. Is that such a bad and unaccurate thing to say, in light of the situation?
   I feel Schindler's own intelligence and strength of character is not given enough credit in the book; due to the fact that he was out to exploit the situation for personal monetary gain intially(i.e. he was a opportunistic business man cashing in on the war and occupation), and because he lost his health and failed after the war finished, it is easy to put his success down to war time craziness and the skill of the men running his factories. He was not a moral man in the conventional sense, he liked women, drinking and living in the moment but i think it was his free-spiritedness, that when given the power, compelled him to use it in a humanitarian way rather than worry about his own security, which is the accepted way to do things. Ultimately Oscar Schindler lived from his heart, he understood this, u get this from the book, and why the book is a great effort in bringing us his life story, to me the author's judgement on Oscar is not as good as it should be, due in part i suppose to the clinical unromantic objectivity that is expected of a researcher.



3. What horrible writing. Never (well almost never) have I read a biography with such a facinating subject, with such in-depth research, more boringly presented.
   
   The writing is terrible. The subject, a man of many layers living in arguably the most morally testing time of the 20th century, just lays there on the page, fact after fact, and never comes alive. Getting through this book was some chore, and that's from someone who really WANTED to read this book. I have to agree with the professional reviewer who used the word, "maddening" to describe the writing here. Really, the author's editor should be taken off the job, but the author is certainly no great shakes as a writer and deserves his lumps also. Not recommended, except to those who really want to plow through a pile of chaff to get to the wheat.



4. This book is an incredibly detailed biography of Oskar Schindler. Because it is so detailed, sometimes it is not easy to read. On the other hand, Crowe certainly presents a far more complete picture of Schindler than does Thomas Kenneally's novel.
   
   Crowe's discussion of Schindler's prewar career is especially interesting. The novel Schindler's List seemed (at least to me) to imply that Schindler was a successful businessman before World War II.
   
   But Crowe suggests that Schindler was essentially a drunken ne'er-do-well until about 1935, when Schindler began to get a steady income by spying for the German Abwehr (military intelligence). Schindler helped recruit German agents in order to aid Germany's conquest of Czechoslovakia, and was so heavily involved with Abwehr that the Czech government imprisoned him for spying in 1938 and investigated him for war crimes after World War II. When war broke out, Schindler moved east with the German army, believing that there was easy money to be made.
   
   Paradoxically, Schindler's involvement with Abwehr made his wartime heroics possible- not just by placing him in Eastern Europe, but also because his Abwehr connections helped him avoid being harassed by the Gestapo. In addition, the Abwehr bureaucracy was generally hostile to the SS (which had its own spies and was thus a bureaucratic rival), so perhaps Schindler's Abwehr associations helped to turn him against Nazism.
   
   This book also tries to answer the question: why did Schindler work so hard to protect his Jewish workers? Crowe concludes that by the end of the war, Schindler was probably motivated primarily by moral considerations. But at the beginning of the war, Schindler had economic motives for protecting Jews as well: because Jews were essentially slaves, they were far cheaper to employ than Christian Poles. While Schindler paid Poles up to $10 per hour, he could rent Jews for less than $2 a day from the SS. Schindler's involvement with Jews was a gradual process:as late as 1942, his workforce was overwhelmingly Christian, and he had only a few Jewish employees. But even in the war's early days, one of Schindler's Jewish employees, Abraham Bankier, was indispensable because of his skills in making black market profits for Schindler. But an employer solely interested in money would have abandoned his Jewish employees once the SS began to insist on liquidating them.

No comments about A Gypsy in Auschwitz.

No comments about Lost Hero: Raoul Wallenbergs Dramatic Quest to Save the Jews of Hungary.

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.

2 comments about This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz.

1. This account of an Italian family's brutal experience at the hands of the Nazis is riveting. Ms. Sonnino writes in a spare, unflinching style. What isn't spared is the horror that she and her beloved family endured. From safe house to safe house, to their discovery, to their horrific journey to the the death camps in Poland, to their hearbreaking seperation, to the inhuman treatment they suffered with such dignity, it is a tale I will never forget. This book will take its place as required reading for anyone who wants to understand the depths to which humans can fall, and the effort that one woman made to rise above it somehow.



2. Every story that is told about someone who witnessed the war during the years of WW2 is incredible. Its sometimes hard to read about these events over and over, but the enormity of it all is almost beyond belief. This is a fast read and the foreword and afterword are important additions to the story as written.

5 comments about In My Brother's Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith after the Holocaust.

1. I thought this was a good book and could not put it down. It explores the issues of assimilation among Budapest's Jews, conversion issues, Jewish and Catholic relations, Jesiwh security or lack thereof, Catholic complicity in the Holocaust and the Catholic church setting the stage for millenia that made the Holocaust possible. It also talks of family love and connectedness despite serious philosophical differences. We're discussing this in my book club and it should be very interesting.



2. I remember reading about this real-life story a number of years before this book was actually published; I still have the clipped article from the Boston Globe in one of my scrapbooks. Then, when I was a student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mr. Pogany came to our Hillel one Friday night and after services and dinner read from his book and spoke to us about the story behind it. Having met the author makes reading a book even better!
   
   I've very interested in what befell Hungarian Jewry during WWII, possibly because it's so painful and haunting to realise that they were the last nation to be invaded by the Nazis, the final Jewish community in Europe still pretty much fully intact, but for the men who had been drafted into labour battalions or sent off to work camps several years earlier. It's an even more interesting and unique story because the family became Catholics shortly after WWI ended, and they were very devout, so much so that the author's uncle Gyuri eventually became a priest, and his father, Miklós, had seriously contemplated becoming one too. Because of a painful health condition, Gyuri got permission to recover his health in Italy, which was a stroke of luck, since he got out before things really began getting worse and worse, even before the arrival of the Nazis. Though the twins' mother was deported and murdered, the rest of the family did not live in the small town she did, and because they were in Budapest did not suffer the fate of the other Hungarian Jews in smaller towns and cities, who were packed into ghettos and then deported. The Budapest Ghetto wasn't erected until very late in the War, and when Miklós and his wife Muci (also a distant cousin of his) were finally deported, they were "only" taken to Bergen-Belsen as opposed to one of the death camps in Poland like the majority of their Hungarian co-religionists had been.
   
   Because he was tucked away safely in Italy, a place which only lost about 19% of its prewar Jewish population, in the care of the holy mystic Padre Pio, Gyuri was not subject to anything like his twin brother and the rest of their family were. He could never understand why his beloved twin had lost faith in Catholicism and Christianity, how he could go back to Judaism, the religion they'd left as small boys and had never even really been very much of a part of in their early years before they all converted. Many people both then and now have made apologies for the collaboration, either active or through silent complicity, of ordinary citizens in allowing the Shoah to take place, much like Gyuri did, but Miklós and Muci had seen firsthand what had happened to them. Despite nearly thirty years of being a good Catholic, he was not protected from even the "good" labour brigade for converts. In the eyes of the Nazis and ordinary Hungarians, his family were still Jewish. The local parish priest arranged for their mother Gabriella to be taken from the ghetto to his church every day to hear Mass before she was deported, but he still didn't try to hide her or protect her from deportation. This book explores the complex relationship between not only the brothers who were separated by faith but also how the Church failed to protect its members, all members, and to speak out against what was going on, and how something of such a large scale could never have happened without the kind of hatred and collaboration from the common folk that the Poganies saw breaking through the surface after the Nazis and Hungarian fascists came to power.



3. The book, In My Brother's Image, was a book that caught my attention and made me want to keep reading. This book showed this very well. You learn about Gyuri and Miklos', identical twin brothers, life before the war when they were best friends, during the war how religion had torn them apart and the events leading to it, and after how different they had become. Miklos' son Eugene wrote the book, not Gyuri or Miklos. He vicariously wrote it and he makes it seem as though he were right there. The accounts in this book are based upon his father, uncle, aunt, and printed documents from the time such as newspapers and books.
   I, personally, am very into the Holocaust and what happened to families before, during, and after the war so if you are too I definitely think you should consider this book. If you like to see how people can change on a general level this is a good book. If you are like me, liking to learn about the Holocaust or history for that matter, this is an excellent book. Those on grade level 10, 11, and 12 (and on) will be able to understand book because of the language and words used. So once again read this book.



4. This Book is for everybody to read, it is very interesting and powerful



5. Well written biographical story about the Hungarian experience during the Holocaust and beyond. Very revealing. Fascinating story about two brothers and their different choices.

3 comments about Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of L Duce.

1. As I listen to the nightly news about our own Governments actions, I find it interesting to read about others. Ours certainly does a bunch of stupid stuff. But then you look at what others do and have to agree with Churchill that a democracy is the worst form of government except that all the other forms are worse.
   
   In this book on the last 600 days of Mussolini, you get a very clear illustration of this point. In his last days, Mussolini was a tyrant, yet at the same time he was utterly miserable in the grip of anger, shame and depression. The German forces that had been supporting were being driven from Italy by the Americans and British.
   
   Mussolini had had the power, as it was said, "he made the trains run on time." But in the end he had failed, and he knew he had failed. He had tried to run a country. And he made some tragic errors. We have so many books on Hitler, it is nice to see that finally we are beginning to see what happened in another aspect of WWII.
   
   I was also amused to see the points of controversy that remain sixty years later. I guess that like the killing of Lincoln and Kennery, and events like Pearl Harbour and the World Trade Center, mysteries will always remain.



2. The best yet on this phase of the war...
   
   ... More extensive review to follow soon.



3. Ray Moseley does an excellent job in bringing to light the final days of Italy under Mussolini. The Republic of Salo which is formed after the Nazi's free Mussolini from prison is a vague attempt to showcase that Italian people are still in control in Italy. As Moseley shows the Republic had no real power and Mussolini was consulted on almost nothing leaving the German military to run the state. The book jumps around on many topics and discusses Mussolini's stances on a variety of issues from anti-semitism to law and order in the fascist decrees he issued during this republic. The final fall of Mussolini and his capture amongst the mountains of lake Como are very well done and then the final part focuses on various myths related to Mussolini. While the book bounces around it is a great contribution to the last 600 days (594 to be exact) of Mussolini's empire and the tragic fall of Italy's most powerful leader.

1 comments about Pilgrim Among the Shadows/a Memoir (A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book).

1. I am reading "Pilgrim Among the Shadows" by Boris Pahor (Orlando, FL, 1995, Harcourt Brace & Co.), a translation by Michael Biggins from the Slovenian of "Nekropola." It appears to be the only work by Pahor to have been translated into English.

   Pahor's experience was in Natzweiler -- and later in Dachau. He tells the
   grisly tale of how Italy persecuted the speakers of Slovenian and
   Serbo-Croatian in the areas it annaxed after World War I and expanded into after the outbreak of World War II. For Pahor, a Triestino Jew barred from speaking his own language and whose main memories are of gravestones on which the names were italianized and of the main Slovenian library in Trieste being burned to the ground by blackshirted fascists, Natzweiler (he does not explain why he ended in that camp high in the Vosges mountains of France) proved that the ties among "Yugoslavs" were strong despite the signs of breakup after the death of Tito.

   This is a literary memoir -- awfully hard to read with constant flashbacks
   from present to past and back again -- that does flesh out some horrors.
   For example, the hot water in the showers at Natzweiler came from boilers placed above the crematorium ovens (something I did not find in
   Buchenwald).

   Peculiarly, Pahor hardly mentions his own Jewishness.

5 comments about The Double Bond: The Life of Primo Levi.

1. I thought the concept of writing psychobabble books had gone out of style in the 1970s -- that is the concept of a biographer who did not know his/her subject personally, did not interview most of the subject's contemporaries (especially family members) and did not have access to any psychoanalytic records, writing an utterly speculative, fiction-laden account of a "great man's (or woman's)" life. This book by Angier is just such a pile of speculative junk. And poorly written and poorly organized to boot.

   Mind you, I am a fan of "analytical" biography & history. Where the author does not just narrate but attempts to interpret the facts & to tease out conclusions. Angier has gone so much farther than that. Since she speculates without facts and ignores existing facts (which is to say, the material in Primo Levi's own wonderful writings). She turns an interesting man, a fascinating man into a pathological man, who is no more than her (made up) aggregation of psychological complexes.

   I am so disappointed in the NY Times Review of Books for having featured this volume on the cover of their publication this weekend. Angier should pay me for having read it. Instead, I paid her.

   Instead of wasting your money on this junk, buy a complete set of Primo Levi's works [...]. And if you own them already. There is nothing better, I think, than reading the Periodic Table again.




2. Judging from the wildly differing reviews that have appeared in newspapers in the past few weeks, this book seems to inspire either passionate admiration or something akin to personal rage. It isn't hard to understand why: Angier has written a highly unconventional, imaginative biography, in which she is herself a character at times, and tells us almost as much about what it's like to write a biography as about the life of Primo Levi. She has also dared to use her own intuition -coupled with, and informed by, her scrupulous research and reflection -- to deduce things that Levi, a very private man, did not himself talk about. Finally, she has clearly angered the people who do not want to believe that Levi killed himself; it is impossible to believe, after one has read her, that his fall from the landing of his apartment building in Turin was accidental. Perhaps even more disturbing to those who saw him as some kind of radiantly sane figure is her sorrowful conclusion that he did not do it because, or primarily because, of what he had suffered in Auschwitz.
   The portrait of him that emerges is of a man who was not the secular saint, the avatar of reason, that his readers have supposed, but something greater: a tragically repressed man who struggled with overwhelming depression all his life (except, ironically, as Angier tells us, when he was in Auschwitz), triumphing not so much in his person as in the great books in which he refused to give way to it. It seems a more amazing accomplishment that a deeply troubled, self-doubting, conflicted man should have produced those masterful works of illumination and sanity than if he had simply been the serene figure of his readers' imaginings. And it should come as no surprise to anyone that literature of the high order of Levi's does not come out of an effortlessly serene mind. Angier makes it clear what a conscious artist he really was.

   Though she sometimes hammers her point home rather than allowing the reader to arrive at his own conclusions about the conflicts that lay at the heart of Levi, it seems impossible that anyone will ever come closer to penetrating the mystery of the man.




3. Carole Angier deserves the thanks of anyone seriously interested in the life of this strange and amazing man who helped and continues to help mankind to deal with the massive trauma of World War II and, further, with all attempts since then to kill the soul. She has spent years in attempting to discover him, in assessing what is factual, what can be conjectured, and what is unlikely about this man who was so reticent and whose family and friends are devoted to respecting his privacy and that of his family. However, it is true that a great man belongs to the world too.

   Unfortunately the world will not tolerate the fact that he was human and seems not to want to forgive him for taking his own life, as appears likely, especially in view of his call for help to Rabbi Toaf shortly before his death. Myth does not grow well in the presence of fact, and the facts that Carole Angier has tirelessly gathered will enrich our understanding immeasurably but have disappointed some. This seems true too regarding her altogether modest and to my mind reasonable and well-founded speculations as to his motivations and of the emotional flow of his life. Levi himself saw this coming, said that he was not a "guru" and could not bear the weight of such a role.

   She seems to me to have come to central and moving understandings of his surroundings. One can only stand in awe of the amount of information she has absorbed in her attempt to make the most accurate portrayal of the influences impinging upon him. Her depiction of the Auschwitz environment is as complete as I have ever seen; her understanding of how there could be non-shameful fellowship there which would turn to shame when viewed by the outside world; her understanding of the sad fate of the Samaritan Lorenzo, who could not tolerate his life after Auschwitz, that this is how heroism is, "a historical glory but a personal burden." True for Lorenzo and for Primo Levi as well.

   It has become fashionable in Primo Levi circles to reject absolutely studies of him, as the previous biography by Anissimov, which are in any way flawed. But the truth is we owe a debt of gratitude to her as well; she roughed in the picture and indicated areas that need to be understood. Primo Levi induces in his readers a protective possessiveness; everyone who reads and loves him wants to rescue him from the imperfect perception that has just been promulgated. This is sainthood in formation. But he was not a saint; he was an imperfect and therefore all the more amazing human being.

   Carole Angier has given us a relentlessly factual, moving, and gracefully written portrayal of this complex man. This is the best of biography. She deserves our thanks also for rendering him as we feel he would have liked, in shades of gray, but gray composed of flashes of brilliance mixed with the most horrifying black. Levi was a true Perseus, able to look at the face, see down the throat, of the terrifying Gorgon, able to return and to summon up the courage to tell us the revolting horror. Carole Angier in her remarkable book has helped us to understand the formation of the man who did it, how he could stand it, and what it cost him and those around him.




4. As awful as current events seem to be, with unsettled questions about who is most likely to die next dominating much of the news, this book takes a look at how a great writer managed, as best he could, for a time. Applying political psychology to figures who assumed some importance in our evaluation of the most catastrophic events in the twentieth century can still be disconcerting, as I myself might be the worst example. Part of the joke of MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK was that a 19-year-old G.I. grunt in Nam might say things that you would never expect to hear from the kind of genius who survived Auschwitz and wrote about it in the manner of Primo Levi in THE PERIODIC TABLE, which was an American best-seller when it was translated into English.

   Carole Angier seems very English and aiming for an audience at a university level of views, far removed from the concerns of those Americans who need a little more control over what is happening in the world, as expressed in an article in The New York Times of March 31, 2003, of a situation which is assumed to be temporary:

   Eleven days into the American-led war here, the narrow, once fertile crescent of territory that gives Iraq its only outlet to the sea remains a land of insecurity and ambivalence, devoid of the euphoria that American and British soldiers hoped to encounter in southern Iraq.

   People who experienced a sense of euphoria in reading Primo Levi's reflections on life as an understanding of chemical elements are sure to find THE DOUBLE BOND by Carole Angier dismal evidence that Primo Levi's life remained "a land of insecurity and ambivalence," and that the inability to write which marked his final days was primarily a lack of the sense of euphoria that newspaper reporters Marc Santora and Craig S. Smith, writing for the Times, had assumed that Americans would expect for those encountered in great historical events.

   This is a big book with a tremendous index, but most people will find that few of the people listed in the index are familiar to them, though two lines are required for the pages on "Americans," as distinct from the three lines for "America/United States." There are also listings for "Britain" and "England," but no extended discussion of the controversy there, in which David Irving is listed for a single page, on the book, HITLER'S WAR. American and England are such outlying areas in the scope of Levi's concerns that the description of his "barrage of articles" (p. 603) trying to counter Holocaust denial seems obsessed with the French. THE DOUBLE BOND is hardly neutral, but mentions such disconcerting facts as that Louis Darquier de Pellepoix was Vichy's commissioner of Jewish affairs. "Darquier was eighty-five years old and clearly senile, he said; since he himself had sent 70,000 French Jews to their deaths, he was hardly a disinterested party." (p. 603). The word "disinterested" here must primarily mean disinterested in the truth. I just received news that a newsman, Peter Arnett, (I am the face), was fired by an American network for talking in Baghdad on Iraqi TV. The standard applied in his case was hardly whether he was still capable of thinking of interesting things to say, but more along the lines of whether other people ought to be given the opportunity to believe what he was thinking.

   In these interesting times, MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK is the worst possible point of view because its interest is primarily in laughing. Primo Levi could never have written MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK, because he did not have the personal interest in pursuing that situation past its most absurd conclusion, that geopolitics could be responsible for the deaths of 3,000,000 Vietnamese without ultimately accepting any responsibility for the fate of the survivors. Levi had math for Europe: "There had been 17 million Jews in Europe in 1939, and 11 million in 1945: where were the missing 6 million?" (p. 603). There might be fewer people in Iraq in a few months than there were a month ago, but Levi is a poor candidate (he's dead, you know) for thinking that anyone could be more disinterested in that than he is.

   On the question of therapeutic value of trying to provide attention to those who need it most, the tangled web in this book is tied to older lives: "from 1978 onwards his depressions were triggered very largely by his mother's decline, and by its consequences. But it was also not true, because neither was natural or external. The truth is that his own relationship with his mother was pathological; and so was the level of care Lucia required them both to give. These together were quite enough to depress him on their own." (p. 602). This is entirely like his relationship to "those who denied the crimes he had devoted his life to recording. They, and they alone, brought out in him absolute intolerance; and a violence of language (`senile', `stupid', `mad') which was to him the essence of the Lager, and normally beyond the pale. The appearance of Faurisson and his ilk was the deepest shock to him: perhaps as deep as the shock of Auschwitz itself. These new Nazis lived in peace and safety, unlike the original ones." (p. 604). Having experienced a bit of shock ourselves, it is not too surprising that some governments have an interest in bringing a bit of shock to Iraq, but hardly like the shock Levi brought when he died in the house where he had been born, Corso Re Umberto 75, "built in the good middle-class areas of Turin around the turn of the century." (p. xxiv). This book honors his life, and is a profound appreciation of the nature and meaning of his death, too.




5. If I were to take you on a tour of my home town and tell you the life story of everyone we met (going back several hundred years in instances) you would quickly overload. "Now who is this again?" you would say. Or "why exactly does that matter?"
   So will you find yourself in Ms. Angier's sprawling parade of peripheral characters, all dredged up, it seems, in apology for the blaring fact that all those whose testament would really matter here aren't talking, for whatever reason.
   Imagine your own life story told from the fragments of those who really only knew you in passing - a girl you dated once, a bully, a high school teacher, a distant cousin. All called upon to comment on your reasoning, your justification in certain actions. All treated as expert witnesses. Some, you might be forced to admit, will come painfully close to the truth. Others way off the mark - only laughable speculations. But who, in your absence, could sort out the one from the other.
   A good biographer, you would hope.
   Ms. Angier is quite capable of writing beautifully, as witnessed in her preface to this book. She has a blazing passion for all things Levi. And she is obviously capable of extensive research. Which leaves us with mountains of detail, oh so much detail. And some convincing passages.
   But actually, after several hundred dry, dry pages, I find myself looking, again and again, for Primo. That vitality of soul demonstrated in his own writings.
   And that is, alas, where I am returning. The horses's mouth. With the wheat already separated from the chaff.