1 comments about Yankele: A Holocaust Survivor's Bittersweet Memoir.

1. I read this book because the author writes about his experience before and during the Holocaust. he comes from the city of Mukachevo in western Ukraine. My parents are from this region and I have a strong interest in this area and its people. His description of Jewish life in this area before the war is wonderful. This is also a well-told and powerful Holocaust memoir. He and his six siblings miraculously all survived the death camps of Auschwitz.

   The majority of the book, however, is about his post-Holocaust experiences and his family life up to 1983. He was a moderately successful businessman in the United States who was involved in partnerships with his brothers. He talks about his wife and four children and his business successes and failures. These are hardly memorable topics. However, he brings such a sincere and ethical perspective to his story and makes these simple things of daily life interesting to read about. As a non-Jew, I find this book a wonderful outline of the positive ethical values of the Jewish religion as revealed in the life of one Jewish family.

3 comments about Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss (Capital Discoveries) (Capital Discoveries).

1. Twelve wonderful, talented women have taken the time to share their view of the world as it was shaped for them by their parent's Holocaust experience. Rather than turn embittered or defensive, these women turned that legacy of loss and pain into beauty, light, joy and love. We can all learn from these women - that we must honor our pasts, but live life each day, full of hope and happiness. That is the gift to us from the generation before - the ability to go on. Daughters of Absence is a lesson we all need to read, learn and live.

   Thank you ladies, one and all, for sharing your stories. I am a better person for having read the book. You touched my heart.




2. Mindy Weisel has beautifully compiled, and elegantly introduced, a remarkable collection of intimate pieces on the most difficult of topics.



3. Aptly edited by Mindy Weisel, Daughters Of Absence: Transforming A Legacy Of Loss is an impressive and revealing collection of writings of the children of Holocaust survivors. It is also an homage to Holocaust survivors, intended as a gift from the children of those survivors to their parents, and as a tribute to the millions who died. With moving, uplifting prose that recounts how the daughters of survivors transforms a legacy of shadow into the artistic light of movies, art, photographs, poems, novels, and lives, Daughters Of Absence is a powerful, life-affirming read and a strongly recommended addition to Holocaust studies reading lists and reference collections.

No comments about Jewish Mystical Leaders and Leadership in the 13th Century.

1 comments about Jews and the Olympic Games: The Clash Between Sport and Politics - With a Complete Review of Jewish Olympic Medallists.

1. This book finally and forever puts to rest the myth that Jews aren't sportspeople. The list of Jewish competitors at the Olympic Games, winners of numerous medals despite a century of Anti-Semitism and restrictions, is staggering. Paul Taylor has done a wonderful job in bringing to the fore the Jewish sports stars, their stories, the efforts they went to just to compete on equal terms, and the frustrations they suffered. Taylor also details the anti-semitism of the Olympic movement and the naked racism of so many teams, team managers, and governments which prevented Jewish competitors from participating.
   But most importantly, Taylor has given us numerous personal portraits of stunningly brave individuals who fought against the incalculable difficulties, just to become Olympians.

1 comments about A Private War: Surviving in Poland on False Papers, 1941-1945.

1. In his preface, Oscar E. Swan describes prewar Polish Jewry without the usual anti-Polish bias: "In the United States, with its tradition of rapid cultural assimilation, it may be difficult for the reader to imagine the tremendous gulf separating Polish and Jewish society in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s...there were the `Litvak" Jews, recently arrived from the east and speaking little or no Polish, and the Orthodox Jews, who had kept their own dress, language, customs, religion, and schools, resisting even a modicum of accommodation to the prevailing culture. Despite the inevitable sharp social tensions created by such a situation in this fiercely Catholic country during the economic hard times of the 1930s, and despite anti-Jewish sentiment, demonstrations, and clashes at the universities, in labor unions, and in other areas of public life--often enough fomented by the Nationalist element among Polish politicians--most urban Jews in Poland before the war lived in peace and relative prosperity." (pp. xxi-xxii).
   
   In the Foreword, British historian Norman Davies adds: "In the era of Nationalism, there were Poles of the National Democratic persuasion who treated all Poland's ethnic minorities, including the Jews, with undisguised hostility, just as there were growing numbers of Jews of the Zionist persuasion who treated Poland as a country fit only to turn their backs on...it would also be inaccurate to suggest that Poland ever experienced the same level of pathological racism which has reigned at various times in neighboring Germany or Russia." (p. viii).
   
   Shatyn describes the prewar Litvaks, some of whom had migrated westward to his native Krakow (Cracow), as follows: "...for the most part they were wholesalers, supplying goods either to local stores or to shops in the many small towns in the countryside. They engaged trained bookkeepers to keep their books for tax purposes, but in addition they all carried in their pockets little notebooks in which their actual accounts were kept, accounts different from those found in the bookkeepers' neat ledgers. The information in those little books was entered in a Hebrew script, legible only to them. They were excellent tradesmen, and, universal opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, they never cheated or swindled, though they drove a hard bargain." (pp. 101-102). The reader can understand how the Poles, even if not openly exploited, naturally resented being the generation-after-generation recipients of these hard bargains. BTW, isn't tax evasion a form of swindle, and isn't defrauding the Polish government also a defrauding of the Polish nation?
   
   Bruno Shatyn (Szatyn, Schatten) was an atypical Polish Jew who, speaking fluent Polish and lacking Semitic features, survived the Nazi occupation in the open. His entire work is remarkably free of Polonophobia, and at no time does he become so Judeocentric as to ignore Polish martyrdom. For instance, he gives an eyewitness account of the slaughter of defenseless Polish civilian refugees by strafing German planes in 1939 (p. 116).
   
   Shatyn points out that most Polish Jews scoffed at the notion that the conquering Germans would exterminate them (p. 133, 163). This further undermines the fear-of-Nazi-extermination justification for the extensive 1939 Jewish-Soviet collaboration. Furthermore, the Jewish pro-German mental inertia persisted well after the beginning of the mass extermination of Jews: "Who could believe that these proper, upright, hard-working people would commit mass murder? Even now, when we know that it is true, we still can't get used to the idea." (p. 194).
   
   For security reasons, Shatyn tried to avoid those who knew him. Realizing that his Polish friends wouldn't betray him, he feared that they may divulge his Jewishness through some indiscretion or under Gestapo torture (p. 186). As for the szmalcowniki (blackmailers), he recognized the fact that these extortionists were marginal members of Polish society and that their acts were criminal rather than anti-Semitic in nature: "...the scum of society, the sort of person who, discovering that someone was a Jew, blackmailed the victim to his last penny and then, when he was penniless, denounced the unfortunate to the police, in full confidence that he would be eliminated and, with him, all evidence of the informer's crime." (p. 186). Shatyn also feared the Gestapo-serving Jewish informers, who made the rounds looking for fugitive Jews (pp. 186-187, 195).
   
   On two different occasions, when the Germans were parading and/or humiliating the Jews before killing them, Shatyn wrote: "The Poles lined the sidewalks, looking on in absolute silence, as though frozen in place." (p. 42). Also: "Poles gathered on the sidewalks, incredulous, some crossing themselves at this monstrous sight." (p. 121). These accounts further contradict the selectively-chosen ones, by Jan Tomasz Gross, of Poles rejoicing at Jewish suffering. And, unlike Gross, Shatyn recognized the efficacy of the German-imposed death penalty in the deterrence of Polish aid to Jews (p. 48, 178, 186).
   
   Shatyn provides intriguing details about his monitoring of German trains and skillfully deductions of their cargo and its implications (p. 223). Some rather imaginative Polonophobes have maliciously asserted that the Nazis built their extermination camps on Polish soil because the Poles would tolerate, if not welcome, them. That the German herrenvolk would consult the defeated Polish untermenschen is preposterous on its face! As a further irony, the Germans attempted to keep the camps secret from Poles. Shatyn reports that Polish conductors were removed from the death trains as they neared the camps, to be replaced by the SS and their Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators (p. 21). During their journeys, the train windows were barred, and no one was permitted near them (p. 224), though the weak moans of the victims could be heard in the fields.
   
   Finally, Jews weren't the only scapegoats. The Germans also adopted a blame-the-victim mentality against Poles for Germany's misfortunes, notably after Stalingrad: "They claimed that everything was the fault of the verfluchte Polen--had it not been for their resistance to the German invasion in September 1939, this war which was now threatening to destroy the Reich would never have started." (p. 227).

1 comments about For the People I Love and Can't Forget.

1. I had the pleasure of meeting the author of this book, Maria Szapszewicz, at the Jewish Center in Saint Louis; she was telling her story at the center and it was touching to hear her story. I am so glad Maria has had the opportunity to publish her poems and her story. I have been moved by the poem, "They Left The Shoes"......as I read the poem, I could hear Maria's voice from when she recited the poem at the center.....touching! Thank you, Maria, for freeing your voice.
   A must read for all!!!

2 comments about Chaim Potok: A Critical Companion (Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers).

1. This is a book that evokes the broad spectrum of books that Chaim Potok has written, but most especially The Chosen. Beginning with a history of the author and then a history of the Jewish-American novelist, Sternlicht gives us the advantage of his teaching in the Jewish Studies program at Syracuse University. Each novel is then adressed, with a careful description that brings back the delight of its original reading, and then followed by a discussion in its larger historic and ideational context. It is a most enjoyable and informative book, reminds one of the pleasure from earlier Potok novels, and I hope for more of the same from Sternlicht.



2. Sanford Sternlicht's CHAIM POTOK: A CRITICAL COMPANION is part of the Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers series put out by Greenwood Press. Having worked at a public library reference desk, serving high school students in very real need of in-depth sources on modern writers, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It admirably and thoroughly fills a serious scholarly gap for students needing information on Potok, one of our greatest modern Jewish American writers. In addition, the book is an interesting and informative read on its own. What I found in the book piqued my interest and I plan to read at least three of Potok's novels.

   The book leads the reader to an understanding of Chaim Potok and his works on many fronts. There is a short biography of Potok, an analysis of his literary acheivements and his sources of inspiration, and then an most helpful analysis of each of his eight novels; each novel is assigned its own chapter.

   A most intriguing feature in Sternlicht's book is his explanation of various styles of literary criticism, followed by an application of that style of criticism to a Potok novel (i.e., psychoanalytic theory is applied to The Chosen, reader-response criticism is applied to The Book of Lights, feminist criticism is applied to Davita's Harp, etc.). Far from being a dry or dull, these discussions and analyses are clearly written and shed light on aspects of the novel that the reader may have never before considered.

   Another fine aspect of the book is that Sterlicht provides the historical background of each novel as well as character and plot development and thematic and symbolic elements. Each of these aspects of the novel being discussed is laid out in a clear, concise, and logical fashion, making the book very easy to use for students doing research on Potok's novels.

   I don't think that anyone could ask for a clearer or more balanced analysis of Chaim Potok's novels than what Mr. Sternlicht has provided in CHAIM POTOK: A CRITICAL COMPANION. It belongs in all secondary school, undergraduate, and public libraries, and in the private libraries of anyone who enjoys Potok, American literature, and/or just a plain old good read.

   Sternlicht's qualifications as a prolific author and as professor of both English and Judaic studies at Syracuse University are very much in evidence in this volume. He has performed a great service both to Mr. Potok and to lovers and students of literature everywhere.

1 comments about Eliezer Ben-yehuda: 2 (Jewish Biography Series).

1. A wonderful story for the whole family! See how God's hand was on this man and how he was destined to revive the Hebrew language from the time he was a boy. His life is an inspiration.

2 comments about Marcel Singer: The Gentle Butcher of Hongkew.

1. This is the amazing story of an Holocaust survivor and his family. The Singer family is from a small town in Austria, and in 1938 they flee the Nazis to Shanghai, China, where they live for the next 11 years, 3 1/2 of them in the Hongkew ghetto. I learned a lot about this little side chapter of WWII. A remarkable and powerful story of survival.



2. This is an amazing story of a man's journey from the depths of Austria with the Nazis breathing down his neck to America. This is a biased review because this book is about my step-grandfather. Dispite this fact it is an excellent book that can't be put down. With flamboyant and interesting characters including Marcel's tough mother, stubbron father, and care-free brother. I am proud to say I know this amazing man.

No comments about Reading Charlotte Salomon.