No comments about Exile at Home.

5 comments about Inge: A Girl's Journey Through Nazi Europe.

1. Much has been written about the millions who were murdered during the Nazis' Holocaust bestiality yet we know less about the effect on thousands of child survivors who suffered separation from family, deprivation and often multiple escapes during World War II. In "Inge" author Gumpert vividly portrays the anxieties and trauma of an innocent young girl under the duress of separation, escape and living on the margin. Inge discovers herself and turns from introvert to courageous escape artist, outwitting adult persecutioners. We also learn about selfless and heroic rescuers. It is fascinating to discover her interactions with peers and even the advent of teenage love during her turbulent youth.

   The book vividly presents the gripping dangers and escapades of Inge's teenage years. Even more important, the author reveals Inge's lifelong and unsuccessful struggle to cope with the memories. One feels the author has perhaps finally provided the peace and redemption which escaped Inge during her lifetime.

   As a fellow teenage refugee with Inge in 1940-41 (her first love was my best friend Walter), I knew the facts, but I am deeply moved by the compelling story told by this book.




2. Most books on the Holocaust reflect the horrible trials of those murdered or sent to Concentration Camps. This is a story of a young girl sent by her family to Belgium from Germany before the war. She is tossed into the whirlwind of war and her separation from her family is greatly traumatic for her. She faces her difficult teen years as a refugee in Southern France. The North of France is occupied by the Nazis, who ultimately control the French Government, both north and south. Each year she grows closer to her 18th birthday, she is painfully aware of the French laws will allow her to be turned over to the Nazis and deported. She is not alone in her travail. This story tells of the genuine goodness of those who helped shelter her and get her and many of her friends to Switzerland. There is love, loss and decency. A really different prospective. Should be read by all.



3. This book takes you into the life of Inge Joseph who lived threw the Holocaust, but ultimitly could not get past it.
   
   Inge Joseph was born in Darmstadt, Germany in 1925. She had an older sister and loving parents. When she was young Hitler took power and her life changed. In 1936 her father got arrested and shortly afterwards her sister then 16 went to live in America eventually living in Chicago.
   
   Inge and her mother remained in Darmstadt with the help of her father's wealthy cousin. During this time however Inge left Darmstadt and went to live with her cousin in Belgium. After only living with him a short time he and his wife sent her to live in a hostil run by Mr. and Mrs. Frank (no relation to Anne.) After living there a while, the Nazis invaded Belgium and the Franks sent the girls to France with a group of boys from another hostil in the town they lived in.
   
   The 100 kids went to France and stayed in a barn for a while, until the Swiss Red Cross got involved helping them with food, and finding them a castle to live in.
   
   Life was not easy in the barn or castle, but Inge and some of her friends found love. During the time in the castle the oldest of the children were arrested and sent to a concentration camp, but managed to go back to Chateau le Haille (the castle). Several months later the person in charge decided that the oldest ones needed to escape.
   
   After a failed escape leading to the deaths of Inge's friend and boyfriend Inge made it to Switzerland and finally to the United States to reunite with her father and sister.
   
   Inge tried to get over her experiences, married a Austrian Jew and adopted a daughter named Julie, and also became a nurse. Unfortunitly she was not able to and became addicted to medication that caused her to die in 1983.
   
   A very interesting story, one can't forget



4. I won't go into a synopsis since the readers before me have very detailed ones.
   I checked this one out from the local library. I could not put it down. I was able to finish in 2 days. I found myself following her on her journey. The book is very well written and really involves the reader in what life may have been like for her. I am purchasing this one to keep on my shelf. Definitely worth reading and rereading.



5. Unlike many books about the Holocaust this one is truly different in its ending. Suffuring a fate like the Jewish in WWII is not imaginable and this books takes you to a girl and the trials she faced trying to survive and stay connected with her family. This books is an inspiring story of a young girl who tries to survive the terrible fate of her people while trying to stay with her family and the repercussions of this horrible time will never be healed. Although Inge does not get to finish the book herself, her nephew does a great job finishing where she left off. If you like emotional stories that suck you in and you don't want to put the book down, you will love this book!

5 comments about In This Dark House: A Memoir.

1. From the opening papragraph of description of the physical geography through the more difficult terrain of the interior geography of family and self, this book is an honest and eloquent account of growing up and going on, of the power of lies and the power of truth, and finally of acceptance and forgiveness. A finely detailed portrait of a damaged and damaging man, and of the author's road of transcendence and re-connection with her true heritage



2. Louise Kehoe takes the reader through a harrowing and difficult journey with no artifice. She manages to stay honest throughout which is what makes this story so moving. I would highly recommend this book over "After Long Silence" which is in the same genre but lacks the sincerity of this book.



3. Why did no reviewer mention one of the most shocking, pivotal moments in this book? That in 1966, a 17-year-old English girl named Lubetkin, while visiting a friend in Bavaria, was treated by a German doctor for an accident to her hand - and because he suspected that she was a Jew, he chose to inject the tetanus shot into both her nipples (which later abcessed and broke open)! In 1966! Aside from the story of her father's madness (grief-driven insanity is certainly what his behavior seemed to be), looms another question - how could this sort of sadistic torture have been allowed to pass unmentioned by any other observer and to go unpunished in 1966? And in 2000?

   The incident with the Nazi doctor and her parents seeming indifference to it finally lead the teenaged Ms. Kehoe to the realization that she had worth as a person and gave her the strength to break away from her father's "dark house". Unearthing the truth of her father's past buried in literally mountains of lies that comprised the deliberate, sly "shell game" Berthold Lubetkin inflicted on his wife and children is a testimony to the driving force of a tortured child's search for understanding to regain sanity from madness.

   These afternoon not quite four years after Dad's death, I appeared before a rabbinical court in Boston and, having satisfied the three presiding rabbis that I knew exactly what I was letting myself in for, was formally pronounced a Jew."




4. This is a quirky, memorable story - the author is a brilliant writer. Many people have enjoyed this book, so why is it out of print? That really bugs me about the publishing world - how can they allow such great work to fall between the cracks, when real crap - and I mean crap - gets published. This book is a classic. It needs to be available in bookstores everywhere.



5. Louise Kehoe is one of the bravest writers I have never met (although we did have plenty of phone conversations back when she was getting this book through production!) On the face of it, it's another coming of age book; but when you consider her history at the hands of her tortured and conscience-stricken father, and how the consequences of his grief cast a long shadow over the lives of his children...Kehoe masterfully organizes events, emotions, and personalities, and the result is an elegant, elegaic jewel of a book.
   
   There is ugliness; abuse at the hands of a German doctor; emotional abuse heaped upon Louise and her siblings, lies cafefully constructed by her father and executed by her otherwise forthright mother, the untimely death of her older brother, and her harrowing experience with anorexia nervosa.
   
   I wish Kehoe had published more; she is a truly astonishing writer.

1 comments about Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust.

1. Awakening Lives consists of a dozen or so autobiographies written by Polish Jewish adolescents in the 1930s. These autobiographies, translated from Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew, are not only extraordinarily moving but also offer an incomparably rich, kaleidoscopic point of entry into the life of Europe's largest, most creative, and most bewilderingly divided Jewish community prior to the Holocaust. Selected from several hundred such autobiographies written for contests in 1934, 1936, and 1939, the essays here capture Polish Jewry in all its variety. Some writers hailed from the wealthy, urbane Polish-Jewish bourgeoisie, while others were raised in the grindingly poor, often broken families which crowded the Jewish slums of Warsaw and Lodz or Poland's increasingly depressed small towns(shtetlelkh). Some were steeped in religious tradition (though many rebelled against it) while other grew up in families which had already embraced an idealized secular European modernity. At the same time, however, the essays reveal the shared predicaments and dilemmas which make this period of Polish Jewish history so fascinating and so important for understanding both the modern Jewish experience and the modern European experience as a whole. In an environment of rising anti-semitism, spiralling economic breakdown, and intensifying political conflict across Europe, the autobiographers grappled with the great political questions of the era and the proper response on the part of Jews, the nature of Jewish identity and culture, and the question of their own future (and whether, indeed, they had one). At the same time, they wrestled with tremendous candor with the intimate questions of selfhood, sexuality, and worldview common to modern childhood and adolescence. The fact that almost all of these writers would be killed in the years that followed will no doubt haunt many readers and, perhaps, discourage others; the frankness of these autobiographies may disturb those who idealize Jewish life in the old world. But I know of no more moving, gripping, or honest way of encountering the real, complex individuals who made up that world.

2 comments about Hiding from the Nazis.

1. Hiding from the Nazis

   I don't know how old I was when I first learned of the Nazi death camps; the Holocaust was an unknown word. As an adult, young children come to me asking for books about the Holocaust. I am confronted with the question, how much information to give and what form should it take? In this picture book Hiding from the Nazis, David Adler, in slightly stilted, but in unambiguous words lays out the pivotal moments of Hitler's systematic persecution and murder of the Jews in the Netherlands. This true story centers on Lore Gottschall and highlights the danger, isolation, and deep break of trust suffered by those who hid from the Nazis. This story cannot be told with out bringing to light the courage of Dutch families who bravely hid Jews from Nazi invaders. Lore is separated from her family and hidden on a farm in Holland at great peril to her protectors and shows the sacrifice her family made to survive in a personal way. Mr. Adler also shows how rocky the reunion of the Gottschall family was and shares what happened to the Danish family and the Gottschall's after World War II ended. The illustrations of Karen Ritz clearly show the story with color, facial expressions and movement.




2. Hiding from the Nazis

   I don't know how old I was when I first learned of the Nazi death camps; the Holocaust was an unknown word. As an adult, young children come to me asking for books about the Holocaust. I am confronted with the question, how much information to give and what form should it take? In this picture book Hiding from the Nazis, David Adler, in slightly stilted, but in unambiguous words lays out the pivotal moments of Hitler's systematic persecution and murder of the Jews in the Netherlands. This true story centers on Lore Gottschall and highlights the danger, isolation, and deep break of trust suffered by those who hid from the Nazis. This story cannot be told with out bringing to light the courage of Dutch families who bravely hid Jews from Nazi invaders. Lore is separated from her family and hidden on a farm in Holland at great peril to her protectors and shows the sacrifice her family made to survive in a personal way. Mr. Adler also shows how rocky the reunion of the Gottschall family was and shares what happened to the Danish family and the Gottschall's after World War II ended. The illustrations of Karen Ritz clearly show the story with color, facial expressions and movement.

2 comments about Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask.

1. "We Are All Marcos Now"
   Subcommander Marcos and the Politics of Zapatismo
   
   Review of Nick Henck, Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask (Duke, 2007), 499 pp.
   
   Robert Ovetz, Ph.D.
   
   The Zapatistas are widely credited with launching the anti-globalization movement on New Year's day 1994, the first day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect. What is less known is that in doing so the Zapatistas created a new model that has made taking up arms compatible with simultaneously taking up the cause of grassroots democracy, a paradoxical phenomenon vividly illustrated by Nick Henck in his fascinating new book Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask.
   
   When I interviewed Subcommander Marcos and reported for CNN on the uprising on that day in San Cristobal de las Casas, it appeared as if they had emerged overnight, a spontaneous rupture in the supposed political calm of Mexico and the emerging web of a restructured global system. Nothing could be further from the historical record, a record Hick Henck, associate professor of law at Keio University in Japan, recounts and examines with exhaustive thoroughness and insight. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN or Zapatista) uprising was no spontaneous rebellion, but a model of revolutionary armed struggle refashioned by local indigenous communities facing the terror of local violent greedy landholders and corrupt local and state officials.
   
   While never having met Marcos, Henck's biography carefully explores countless published interviews, communiques, media reports, web postings, and the two other existing published books about Marcos. Although a biography, Henck's focus is informed by his passion to understand the movement of Zapatismo from the perspective of the man who has become a charismatic, even sexy, icon of the rebellion. Subcommander Marcos makes a convincing case that Zapatismo transformed not only the global movement challenging to "neo-liberalism" and globalization but how the movement was organized.
   
   Despite preparing for guerrilla warfare in the jungles and countryside for 10 long years, after a mere 12 days of conflict in 1994 the Zapatistas agilely transformed themselves from an "army of liberation" into a facilitator of mass mobilization of what they call "civil society". That they were eventually successful in achieving significant progress towards three major objectives in less than a decade has remained the backstory to coverage about the enigmatic and secretive masked pipe brandishing icon Subcommander Marcos. The Zapatista uprising put indigenous issues center-stage with the Mexican media and public for the first time, with an indigenous rights bill being debated in both chambers of the Mexican Congress. This debate led to the passage of a watered down version of the San Andres Accords between the Zapatistas, its civil society allies and the government as a constitutional amendment. Although it is impressive that the government would amend the constitution in response to the Zapatista movement, the amendment has not lived up to claims that it expanded the rights of Mexico's indigenous peoples. The amendment also did not reverse NAFTA's rescinding of Article 27 of the constitution, which prohibited the privatization of communal ejido land, and some indigenous groups even consider it to be unconstitutional. Lastly, the Zapatistas were one of the primary forces that contributed to the end of the PRI's seven decades of one party rule.
   
   It appears that for Henck the transformation of the Zapatistas into Zapatismo is of much greater significance than either the story of the former professor turned revolutionary cell leader Subcommander Marcos or their ability to change government policy and provoke a political realignment. After a few years of being ignored in the jungles the handful of FLN (Forces of National Liberation or Fuerzas Liberacion Nacional) members who composed the cell in Chiapas found the locals were sympathetic to calls to pick up arms in self-defense against the theft of their lands by rancher death squads. But the indigenous only really responded to their calls to organize and arm themselves when Marcos and his compatriots realized that "in order to survive we had to translate ourselves using a different code...this language constructed itself from the bottom upwards." (p. 94)
   
   This was no abstract rhetorical exercise but took on tangible dimensions for those who joined, especially among women. As Henck so fascinatingly details, once local young indigenous women discovered that joining the Zapatistas protected them from being raped and forced marriages, they began to join in droves. (p. 100-101) And as the Zapatistas gained a few allies in assorted villages those allies used their family relationships and status in their communities to literally open the tap to a rush of recruits.
   
   As Marcos so deftly recognized, after years of futile effort the number of recruits exploded from only a few dozen members to thousands in just a matter of a few months when they finally surrendered to the needs of the local communities and "decided it would be better to do what they said." (p. 135)
   
   Whether this sudden change in fortunes for the EZLN was catalyzed by Marcos's own innate skill of organizing or something that was thrust upon him from below is less important than Marcos's own flexibility in recognizing the need to break with his own inflexible model of insurgent politics. Eventually, the EZLN formally broke off from the increasingly irrelevant and inactive FLN.
   
   The shift from a military to political strategy resulted in a shift in the man we know as Marcos. As Henck explains, "Marcos abandoned his own personal dreams of becoming a revolutionary guerrilla hero and, reacting to the general public's response to the uprising, began to explore an alternative role for both himself and the movement. He and the EZLN had been gearing themselves for a decade toward a predominantly military role. Now, almost overnight, they opted instead for a predominantly political one. Few politicians and military men have abandoned so rapidly a course of action pursued so intensely, for so long, at such a high personal cost to adapt, revise, and reject their strategies when faced with the dawning realization that they were obsolete." (p. 224)
   
   This internal shift in Marcos's thinking makes Henck's book invaluable less as a biography than as a case study of the emergence and evolution of a new political model, one in which a marginalized top down political organization is reformulated by those it aspires to lead to being led by them. In this process of self-organization from below the movement's objectives become indistinguishable from the model they choose to organize themselves. As a result the EZLN transformed itself from vanguard to facilitator of a horizontal political project of movement building and decentralizing and de-evolving power to local autonomous communities.
   
   Soon after the ending of actual fighting, the EZLN became the framework for building a national movement of movements to challenge the neo-conservative restructuring forced upon Mexico by the PRI and NAFTA. The EZLN and its network of allies soon began organizing frequent Encuentros (or "encounters") and nationwide tours to accompany numerous rounds of negotiations with the government. These efforts were facilitated by the charismatic Marcos becoming an irresistible media spectacle that could at once attract vast national and international media coverage and attention and facilitate a bridge across the diversity of interests among its allies in civil society.
   
   Under the emblem of Subcommander Marcos, the EZLN gave birth to a new radical democracy that at once built a national movement to challenge the global capitalist agenda while linking up to the movement as a support network to defend its project of de-evolving political power to local autonomous cooperatively run villages.
   
   Ever able to read political forces of change and adapt, Marcos early on recognized the shift taking place: "What other guerrilla force has agreed to sit down and dialogue only fifty days after having taken up arms? What other guerrilla force has appealed, not to the proletariat as the historical vanguard, but to the civic society that struggles for democracy? What other guerrilla force has stepped aside in order not to interfere in the electoral process? What other guerrilla force has convened a national democratic movement, civic and peaceful, so that armed struggle becomes useless? What other guerrilla force asks its bases of support about what it should do before doing it? What other guerrilla force has struggled to achieve a democratic space and not take power? What other guerrilla force has relied more on words than bullets?" (p. 235)
   
   The answers to these questions are less important than the fact that they were being asked by the nominal leader of an armed guerilla "army of national liberation." Merely asking these questions underlined a gradual shift of autonomous politics from the margins to the center of the methodology and strategies of the global resistance, anti-war, social justice and environmental movements that have blossomed over the past 13 years. Self-organized, de-centralized, bottom up, and horizontally organized movements, networks, affinity groups and campaigns have achieved a new level of respect, legitimacy and power since the emergence of Zapatismo. These models are exemplified by the higher profile anti-WTO/IMF/World Bank and environmental justice movements, the massive growth of the World Social Forum and less obviously the indie music, microcinema and freecycling movements to name just a few. We have Zapatismo to thank for the re-emergence of what some now call "horizontalism" since 1994.
   
   Throughout Henck's Subcommander Marcos its is hard to avoid asking the inevitable question of "why a biography?." Despite all the glittering stardom for Marcos, his mask and pipe, the success of Zapatista movement is about far more than the man behind the mask. Even as he was "outted" as former UAM professor Rafael Guillén, his own identity no longer mattered. Like the similarly masked hero "V" in the film "V for Vendetta", Marcos had become the anonymous face of those who dreamed of justice and flirted with the forbidden thoughts of escaping to the jungles and picking up a gun to get it. In Mexico at least, where millions answered his calls to mobilize against military repression, it was a dream shared by too many for either the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party or Partido Revolucionario Institucional) or its successor the PAN (the National Action Party or Partido Acción Nacional) or needless to say the Zapatista's "ally" the PRD (the Party of the Democratic Revolution or Partido de la Revolución Democrática) as well to ignore. As Henck generously concludes, "Marcos's charisma served a higher cause than his own ego; it elevated the Zapatista struggle from a localized indigenous uprising to an internationally recognized symbol of resistance to neo-liberalism." (p. 239)
   
   If there is one failing in Henck's biography is it exactly how Marcos was able to translate the hopes and aspirations of the indigenous led Zapatistas into an effective digital media campaign at the dawn of the internet age. Henck provides us with little to envision how Marcos's skillful use of the internet and relationships to Mexican and international celebrities and elites could have possibly emanated from the remote EZLN jungle camps and low tech impoverished indigenous villages. But then again, that could be because it is a safely guarded secret tactic held closely to the chests of the Zapatistas. Despite the obvious need for secrecy, my insatiable craving to know how the EZLN not only crafted their message but actually got it into the right hands to build the national and international recognition and support that repeatedly halted the onslaught of the Mexican military and brought them back to the negotiating table has not been satisfied. For that one must turn elsewhere such as the writings of theorist Harry Cleaver for insights into the workings of the Zapatismo media machine.
   
   For all my biases as the reportedly first journalist to break the story of the Zapatista's new year's uprising for the English language media , Henck's Subcommander Marcos is less a biography than an enlightening case study of how one of the possibly most influential political movements of the 21th century was born, faultered and was then rejuvenated by those it sought to lead. Subcommander Marcos convincingly demonstrates that Zapatismo has created a new model in which taking up arms may finally no longer be incompatible with simultaneously taking up the cause of autonomy and democracy. This book has arrived just in time, when the anti-globalization movement appears to have run out of steam precisely because it has failed to provide a visionary model of the future in the present.
   
   [Robert Ovetz, PhD is an adjunct instructor of political science at College of Marin and of sociology at Cañada College in California.]



2. Nick Henck's biography of Subcommander Marcos is much more than a description of the man's life so far - remember, he's not dead yet! It is an exploration of the Zapatista movement and its significance for 21st century Mexican and Latin American politics. Moreover, Henck demonstrates that, although Marcos is not indigenous to Chiapas himself, his life and work holds important lessons for contemporary indigenous peoples struggling for recognition and respect all over the world.
   
   This book traces Marcos's life from his early days in Mexico City as a child, then student and academic, through his involvement in leftist politics, his move to the Lacandon jungle, his stewardship of the EZLN, and his leadership of the resistance struggle in Chiapas. Marcos is important because he was able, first, to lead a successful armed uprising against an established, corrupt, and dictatorial regime - one that has an important alliance with the United States - and, second, by his skillful use of modern communications he prevented the regime from retaliating with maximum military force. Marcos is, therefore, both a worthy successor in the tradition of Bolivar, Che and Castro, as well as a new type of Latin American revolutionary. In this way, Henck shows that his example provides tremendous optimism for independence movements all over the world, but particularly in Latin America.
   
   This book is surely the definitive work in English on Subcommander Marcos and the EZLN, and is an important contribution to the literature on Latin American revolutionary movements. As such, and as both a challenge and a request to Professor Henck, I hope that he will use this opportunity to develop his research to write more on leaders of contemporary Latin American resistance movements - including Hugo Chavez - in order that we can learn more about this important challenge to the current neo-liberal orthodoxy.

1 comments about Rifke: An Improbable Life.

1. While there is no gainsaying Rifke's material--rags to riches never gets old--her self-deprecating insistence that she might not be up to the task proves all too pointed. Her flat prose never rises to the many occasions, and her bland narrative never seems to get to the heart of the matter--or her heart for that matter. Perhaps a talented biographer will someday use this as source material--until then, gauge your inherent interest in the author and her milieu. Otherwise, there are hundreds of other immigrant narratives that will better reward your time.

2 comments about The Maimie Papers: Letters from an Ex-Prostitute (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series).

1. I liked this book a lot. Maimie's trials and tribulations never abated her spirit and as she hoped against hope and did what she believed right for herself and those near her, she developed into a sharp business woman. If not for the misfortunes of the war she might have become successful and rich, her keen business sense is remarkable in a woman of that period and class. Her faith never lost, she seems to have succeeded (not many records found after the letters end to give us the full picture) in creating for herself a happy and normal life. We should all have such an unquenchable spirit to try and try again and never give up!



2. Maimie Pinzer should never have confined her writing talent to the realm of letters. With her insights, life experience, and ability to tell the truth with the same flair that fiction authors tell a good story, she could have been a social historian on a par with Charles Dickens.
   
   "The Maimie Papers" provides us with invaluable insight into why so many young women chose prostitution over threadbare yet respectable lives. Too many contemporary books and treatises on the subject are religious in theme and little more than repentance speeches from former prostitutes. Maimie Pinzer rationalized her choices without once apologizing for them, and once in a position to do so, combatted the prostitution problem using compassion and common sense, not blind religious fervor.
   
   The book consists of a collection of letters that Maimie wrote to Boston philanthropist Fanny Quincy Howe between 1910 and 1922. Reading each one chronologically, one sees her progress from a floundering victim desperate for 'respectability' to an assertive young woman who challenges the system and may not always win, but emerges stronger via the effort.

No comments about American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture and Life & Brandeis Series on Jewish Women).

No comments about The Life of David: The Man After God's Own Heart (Bible Character Series).