No comments about The Guggenheims: An American Epic.

1 comments about Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality.

1. A great anthology of sermons, prayers, stories, personal testimonies to delve in and return to.

5 comments about Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life.

1. I could not put this book down....it's fantastic! The author, whose mother died when he was a college student, pieces together her pre-motherhood life to create a wonderful story of a complex young woman...a woman who, to paraphrase his words, peaked at a young age and spent the rest of her life trying to capture that success. I appreciate the emotional and literary efforts Mr Freedman put into this book...it was a joy to read and gave me lots of food for thought. Highly recommend!



2. I found Freedman's account of his mother to be melacholy and moving. All our parents remain a mystery to us when they live, more so when they die. Freedman's rejection of his mother in life and embrace is death is deeply touching.



3. My mother grew up in the Bronx not all that far (in time and place) from Freedman's mother Eleanor, so I found this book both nostalgic and deeply touching. Even if I didn't know first-hand about shopping at Alexander's, going to Loew's Paradise, and commuting to City College, I would find this book engrossing.
   
   By tracing his mother's teenage and early adult years and the shifting relationships with family and friends, he shows how her decisions and attitudes influenced who she became--and why she kept her earlier life a mystery from those closest to her. Insightful, with a powerful yet very personal ending. Highly recommended.



4. Sam's insight to the era of the Bronx shows the underlying warmth and respect he has for his family. I could not put the book down; reading well into the night; hours passing quickly. We can all relate, Jewish or non- Jew. They were tough times, not necessarily blessed with opportunities; and especially so for a bright woman with what could have been an even brighter future had she been born in more contemporary times. Thank you for sharing your Mom's life with us. You did it in a beautiful and literary way.
   I gained insight into Fannie's family; folks I have known, loved, respected and whose friendship I have cherished for almost 50 years.
   Thank you, Sam. Great job.



5. This is a moving tribute. The author makes the effort to know and understand his mother after she has died, in part because he senses he has been unfair to her while she lived. Freedman writes with understanding and sympathy of a woman who according to her son reached the peak of her emotional life at seventeen in a love forbidden her by her mother. Freedman tells of how his mother had to sacrifice her own wellbeing and desire for an education in order to help support her very poor family. He blames his grandmother for some of the dissatisfaction in his mother's life. At the same time he praises his grandmother for being the strong and ethical member of the family who cared about what was happening to her relatives in Europe during the Holocaust.
   Freedman blames himself for his behavior as college student and teacher in refusing to acknowledge his mother's presence in the class. He does however indicate that there were many times in their life when he tried to do his best for her. For instance he tells of a story where he bought his mother a special kind of plant , and how disheartened he was when after a few weeks it wilted. His mother comforted him in this.
   It would be nice to think that she knows of his devotion to him and looking down from Heaven is filled with pride and happiness for her son's devotion to her in telling her story.

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.

5 comments about TEARING THE SILENCE: On Being German in America.

1. Ursula Hegi moved to the US from Germany at the age of 18. She was born one year after the war ended, and she remembers vividly what her elders told her about those years. In her Introduction to _Tearing the Silence_, she states why she wrote this book, and how it helped her identify with her cultural heritage. With the title _Tearing the Silence_ she makes her point very clear: Post-war German immigrants have stories to tell.

   Hegi conducted interviews with post-war German immigrants in the US. Most of the stories were similar to her own: born and raised in Germany during, or after, World War II, and immigration to the United States before age 20. Some are children of SS officers, others are children of privates. Some live happy lives and do not focus on the past, others are haunted by what happened.

   There are some great stories in the book--very thought-provoking. I was amazed at how some of the same phrases were repeated in all of the stories--even though the interviewees never met each other. Many were told that there parents "...never knew about the Holocaust", and others said "Germans suffered too..."

   With _Tearing the Silence_, Hegi provided a much-needed contribution to World War II history, and biography.




2. very interesting reading , You don't have to of German heritage to understand the why and how German's are viewed since the war .



3. Hegi has proven herself as equally talented in the nonfiction arena as she has steadfastly excelled in the fiction genre.



4. Tearing the Silence by Ursula Hegi tells the unique and sometimes painfully insightful stories of sixteen German men and women, including the author herself, who were born just after World War II. They are the now-adult children of the German families who lived in Germany during the years of Hitler's Third Reich.
   
   Unlike the many books that have been written about the Jewish experience in concentration camps, these interviewees are the children of Christian families who were not driven out of Germany, but who suffered the consquences of living in wartorn Germany, and their parents' refusal to talk about the atrocities occurring openly in their daily lives.
   
   To her great credit, the author does not paraphrase what she learned from her interviewees. She records their answers faithfully. As I read, I can hear the accents, the speakers' sometimes awkward phrasing, and the wholehearted sincerity of these emigres as they responded thoughtfully and conscientiously to Hegi's probings concerning their lives during this troubling time in our history.
   
   Each interviewee discussed the resentment and often anger they still feel toward their parents for hiding the truth from them, for refusing to answer their questions or for dismissing them with, "We didn't know," or "We just did what we were told." Many of them talk about how their parents' silence and evasions resulted in their own stifling sense of inferiority and lack of trust. Many of them admitted that they still grapple with those feelings today.
   
   I was deeply touched as I read the complicated and conflicting feelings discussed because I too am German, though, being Jewish, my family fled in time to avoid the war. And I too was turned away when I questioned my parents about why we had to leave. I know now that my parents were unable to discuss the trauma of being evicted from their beloved homeland--the country that defined their heritage and which they could not bear to leave. As one woman told Hegi, "You write about things most of us don't dare to look at." Johanna admits to a sentiment many of us share: "If this can be done by human beings, it can be done by me. She asks over and over, "What can we do so this will never happen again?"
   
   Hans-Peter believes that it is already happening again. When visiting Germany he saw the hatred against the foreigners whom Germans believe are stealing their jobs. He saw again how groups of people insist that they are superior to others. He lives with the feeling (and fear) that someone may one day treat him with the same hatred, the same unmitigated violence, and that the same discrimination will start all over again.
   
   A subject that comes up frequently among the interviewees is the dilemma of feeling neither at home in America nor at home in Germany: They feel too German to feel like true Americans and too American to ever feel at home again in Germany.
   
   In addition to their disorientation, there is much shame around being German: "How can we expect others not to hate us for what we have done?" The author tells the story about her fourteen-year-old son Eric's friend, who, upon learning that she is German, asks: "Does that mean you are a Nazi?" She hears the question and can hardly breathe.
   
   Hegi writes about the obedience to authority that was ingrained in all of us and in most of German citizenry, generation after generation. Marika tells us how she believed that if she did exactly as she was told, if she was just "good enough," everything would turn out all right... both in the political future of her country and in her steadily deteriorating marriage. She believed that under no circumstances must she "make waves," or she would "lose everything."
   
   I must say here that this is not just a German way of being. It is universally human to want to take the easier, smoother road. That is why this book has much to offer everyone. I was moved to tears as well as uplifted with admiration as I read the stories of these postwar men and women who experienced firsthand the evils of the Third Reich and have the courage to speak about it.
   
   Hegi, in my view, expresses what is most important in her book when she reminds us of the importance of taking the time to talk with one another... not just about the good things in our lives but about our worries and conflicts as well. She admits there may be pain involved..."But that is only a part of it; there is so much more." Speaking openly and with trust will lead to a greater understanding of ourselves and of one another, and much tragedy will be averted that comes from the refusal to discuss and confront our uncertainties and different points of view.
   
   by Duffie Bart
   for Story Circle Book Reviews
   www.storycirclebookreviews.org
   reviewing books by, for and about women



5. Ursula Hegi must have been squirming during some of these interviews, as the subjects were sometimes brutally and tastelessly honest about their feelings. I found that honesty a draw for me to keep reading. Having read 'Stones From the River', and a few other Hegi novels, I was familiar with her style. However, she mostly lets her interview subjects guide the way; she does great with this style as well. Anyone who is in the least bit interested in what goes on in the minds of some of Germany's children from World War II, should pick up a copy.

No comments about Jewish and Russian Revolutionaries Exiled to Siberia, 1901-1917 (Jewish Studies).

1 comments about Documentors of the Dream: Pioneer Jewish Photographers in the Land of Israel, 1890-1933.

1. This book tells all about jewish photographers in Palestine / Israel in the years 1890-1933. A fascinating book and a great gift!

No comments about Kantorowicz: Stories of a Historian (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society).

1 comments about An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the <i>Diary</i>.

1. Lawrence Graver's thorough investigation of the controversy surrounding Anne Frank and the play based on her diary is as intense as a page-turning mystery novel. Graver weaves the tale of bringing Anne Frank's world-famous diary to the stage, and casts an overlooked player in a major role. Meyer Levin, a Jewish writer relatively well-known in the 1950s, and one of the most successful Jewish writers to write about Jewish themes at that time, was the first to review Anne Frank's diary in the States. In fact, he was instrumental in getting the diary published, and he forged a friendship with Otto Frank. The friendship turned sour as Levin fought for rights to compose the stage script for 1955's "The Diary of Anne Frank." In a legal battle that lasted thirty years, Levin vs. Frank lost Levin his rights to the script he felt best represented Anne--and her Jewishness. Frank and Doubleday sided with the well-known Hacketts--who would win a Pulitzer for their then-loved, now-criticized Everyman version of Anne's diary--and staged the play to rave reviews around the world. Levin took his script to Israel, fighting legal battles in court even to stage it there. Graver does an excellent job of exposing the story and the personalities of all its characters, including Lillian Helman. But Graver rightly shies away from demonizing Levin and canonizing Frank, or vice versa. His loyalty is first to accuracy, and an account that could easily become polarized by a mission to perpetuate the saintliness of Anne Frank and her family comes off as more complex and, ultimately, more informative.

No comments about The Wiles of Women/the Wiles of Men: Joseph and Potiphar's Wife in Ancient Near Eastern, Jewish, and Islamic Folklore.