Tag: holocaust

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Faber and Faber, Fiction, holocaust, literary fiction, Poland, Publisher, Setting, Steve Sem-Sandberg

‘The Emperor of Lies’ by Steve Sem-Sandberg

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Emperor-of-lies

Fiction – paperback; Faber and Faber; 664 pages; 2012. Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death.

Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies won the August Prize — the Swedish equivalent of the Booker Prize — in 2009 and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012.

It is a dense behemoth of a book, with nary a chink of light in its dark fictionalised account of the Holocaust, but I read it at a time when I was looking for something substantial to get my teeth into. At more than 650 tiny print-filled pages, it certainly fit the bill. It is by no means a light or easy read, but it is one that rewards the patient reader.

Based on a true story

The book is based on the factual story of Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, a 63-year-old Jewish businessman, who was the leader of the Jewish ghetto in Łódź. The ghetto — the second largest in Poland — was established by the Nazis in February 1940. Its 200,000 inhabitants were forced to work gruelling hours  — and in impoverished conditions marked by constant hunger, cold and fear — to provide supplies for the German military.

Chaim, who was also known as “Eldest of the Jews” after the Nazis appointed him to the role, was a mysterious figure with murky morals: was he, as many believed, a Nazi pawn, content to do as the Germans wanted in order to save his own skin and fulfil his quest for power? Or was he acting in the misguided belief that if he turned the ghetto into a well-oiled machine for military production he would not only save the lives of those Jews who worked for him but convince the Third Reich that Jews were not the vermin they were thought to be. In other words, was he a sinner or a saint?

The book, which explores this question in exacting, sometimes overwhelming, always meticulous, detail, fictionalises Chaim’s life and the lives of those who lived among him, but it does not provide a definitive answer (although the title might hint at the author’s opinion). What it does is make the reader see the man in all his many facets — some of it good, much of it bad — and leaves you to come to your own conclusions.

Problematic but still powerful

The problem I have with a book of this nature is not knowing what is real and what is not. If it is based on fact and historical research — and the appendices suggest Sem-Sandberg has devoted considerable time in this pursuit — why not write a straight non-fiction book so it’s perfectly clear? Why fictionalise something and then write it in such a way — very dry, prosaic and “journalistic” — that it reads like authoritative non-fiction reportage?

The answer, I suspect, is that the author would find it difficult to bring in the view points of the vast array of characters at the heart of this novel, all of whom were based on real people. (The book is littered with eye witness accounts.) Indeed, there are so many characters that it’s hard to keep track of them (though the guide at the back is helpful), and because it is written from so many perspectives it’s difficult to identify with any one person. I often felt like I’d just got to “know” someone, and then the story switched to a different character and I would have to start afresh, as it were.

This might sound like I am being negative, but I have to admit that I found The Emperor of Lies a truly fascinating and absorbing read. It tends to plod along, but I appreciated the detail and the way in which Sem-Sandberg examines Chaim’s moral culpability. It’s crammed with information but is also very nuanced and moving, so that the weight of the emotion builds slowly and by the final page you feel absolutely shattered. When Chaim sacrifices the elderly and the children of the ghetto to save the working population, it comes as quite a shock. And when you know the fate of those that are disappearing — many were murdered in Auschwitz and Chelmo — when they do not, it is extremely distressing.

Although The Emperor of Lies is a problematic novel, it is also one of the most powerful I have ever read.

You can read more about the real life Chaim Rumkowski on wikipedia (though the articles seems almost as contentious as the person it’s about). And there’s a terrific review — or should I say hatchet job — on the Financial Times website. There’s a more positive take on it in The Independent.

Alison Pick, Author, Book review, Czechoslovakia, Fiction, Headline Review, holocaust, Publisher, Setting

‘Far to Go’ by Alison Pick

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Far-to-go

Fiction – hardcover; Headline Review; 288 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of publisher.

Alison Pick’s Far to Go has been longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize.

It is billed as a history of the Kindertransport — in which nearly 10,000 Jewish children were sent to Britain to escape Nazi Germany during the Second World War — but that’s really only part of the story. The heart of this novel revolves around a married couple, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer, who fail to agree on how to personally deal with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, their homeland, by the Nazis.

The pair are well-to-do non-practising Jews.

Pavel, a wealthy and successful industrialist, refuses to believe that he should do anything other than carry out his life as normal. He is fiercely nationalistic and does not accept that Czechoslovakia will be occupied. He will not kowtow to the Germans, nor feel ashamed of his Jewishness.

But Anneliese, his rather uptight glamorous wife, is frightened. She knows that the political situation does not bode well and takes defensive steps to ensure the family’s safety — moving to Prague, for instance, in the hope that things will blow over. And when they don’t, she is eager to escape eastern Europe altogether. It is only when Pavel continues to bury his head in the sand that she tries to convince him that he should at least think of his six-year-old son, Pepik, and get him on the Kindertransport.

Pepik’s trip to Britain is not so much the focus of the novel, but its climax. His journey does not begin until page 245, which is part four of a story divided into five parts.

What’s more, much of the tale is told through the eyes of a Gentile, who resides with the Bauer family. Her name is Marta and she is Pepik’s devoted nanny. She is quite naive — and young — and gets entangled in an illicit romantic dalliance with Ernst, one of Pavel’s business associates, that puts the Bauer family in danger.

But Marta is kind-hearted and loyal — if occasionally misguided — and very much devoted to her young charge. She is so well drawn that in many ways she is the life and soul of the novel, and it’s hard not to feel for her situation, caught between a young family she wishes to serve and an older man — a Nazi sympathiser — who offers her excitement, passion and intrigue.

This might sound like a fairly straightforward story, but Pick frames it in an usual way, breaking up each section with letters between family members — written after Pepik has gone to Britain — and chapters written by a modern Holocaust expert who has a mysterious connection to the Bauers. This connection isn’t revealed until the very end of the book, which makes for a fine conclusion, and adds an extra layer of meaning to an otherwise predictable plot.

Far to Go, which is based on Pick’s own family history, is not a typical Holocaust novel. Yes, it’s sad and yes, it’s filled with tragedy and betrayal. But this isn’t a story about what happened during the War, but what life was like before the Nazis banished — and exterminated — the Jews and the legacy that survivors were confronted with after their families had been destroyed.

I wouldn’t describe the book as anything particularly special — and I’m loathe to understand its inclusion on this year’s Man Booker longlist — but it’s an interesting story, well told, and there are worse ways to spend your time than reading this one.

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Corsair, Fiction, holocaust, Maria Angels Anglada, Poland, Publisher, Setting

‘The Auschwitz Violin’ by Maria Àngels Anglada

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Auschwitz-violin

Fiction – paperback; Corsair; 109 pages; 2010. Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Any book set in a Nazi death camp brings with it a certain kind of foreboding. But there’s something quite uplifting about Maria Àngels Anglada’s tale of survival set in Auschwitz.

Here, amid the death and brutality, a Jewish prisoner and former luthier is charged with a special task: he must make a violin for the camp’s Commandant using a limited palette of materials and tools. What Daniel doe not know is that if he fails to make the instrument to a high enough standard he will be handed over to the camp’s doctor, a man who conducts terrible experiments on his patients. But if he does build a suitable violin the doctor must hand over a case of wine to the Commandant.

This secret wager is no doubt a cruel one, but because the knowledge of it is kept from Daniel until well into the task (a fellow prisoner lets it slip), it does not affect the way he carries out the job. Indeed, Daniel is already living in fear — mainly because the Commandant’s behaviour is vindictive and unpredictable — so making the violin comes as a welcome distraction.

The story is an incredibly poignant one, especially as it shows how Daniel’s dedication to his craft gives him a reason to continue living when all around him lie starvation, disease and death. The very thought that his hand-crafted violin could be used to make beautiful music provides much-needed hope at a time of great despair.

While the book is far too slim to flesh out characters or provide important background detail, it tells the story in a simple, straightforward prose style reminiscent of short-story writing. And while it might be just over 100 pages long, it’s power should not be under-estimated. The author’s inclusion of real-life extracts from Nazi documents, which are detailed at the beginning of each chapter, only add to the weight of this novella.

The Auschwitz Violin will be published in the UK on November 4.

1001 books, 1001 Books to read before you die, Anne Michaels, Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Canada, Fiction, Greece, holocaust, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘Fugitive Pieces’ by Anne Michaels

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FugitivePieces

Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury Publishing; 304 pages; 1997.

Sometimes I find myself unexpectedly reading one novel after another that share similar themes. I think this is what you call serendipity. Or maybe it’s sheer coincidence. But whatever the case, I couldn’t help but compare Anne Michaels’ novel Fugitive Pieces with the book I’d just finished, Hugo Hamilton’s more recent Disguise.

Both books tell the stories of young Polish boys, orphaned during the Second World War, who start afresh but are haunted by events of the past. But where Hamilton’s novel fails to really pack any emotional punch, perhaps because of the understated writing style and his emphasis on telling not showing, Michaels delivers a hugely poignant story that reverberates long after you reach the final page.

There’s something exceptional about Michaels’ use of language, which conveys the precise mood of a particular moment using prose that reads like poetry, not surprising given she’s an award-winning poet. Here’s an example:

White aspens make black shadows, a photographic negative. The sky wavers between snow and rain. The light is a dull clang, old, an echo of light.

And so it goes. Admittedly, I found this lyrical use of language a little off-putting, to begin with, but once I got used to the rhythms and the pacing and let it wash over me I was held in its sway. In fact, I had to restrain myself from underlining every second passage because I’d end up spending more time vandalising my book than reading it.

But what about the story, I hear you say. Well, it’s just as beautiful and haunting, really. It’s divided into two parts.

A story of two halves

The first is narrated by Jakob Beer, a seven-year-old Jewish boy, who witnesses the Nazis storming his house, killing his parents and older sister.

He flees and hides in the boggy marshes of a nearby wood, where he is later discovered by a Greek geologist, Athos, who takes him back to the sun-filled Greek island of Zakynthos and brings him up as his own son. Here, Jakob is given unconditional love and is schooled in everything from the English language to archaeology. The horrors of the war are never far away though, particularly as the island is under German occupation.

Later, the pair immigrate to Canada and set up a home in Toronto. Jakob goes to university, falls in love, gets married, and becomes a poet and translator. But all the while he mourns the loss of his parents and, in particular, his sister, whose ghostly presence he feels long into his old age.

The second part is narrated by Ben, a 20-something married man, who has long admired Jakob’s poetry, and goes on a mission to find Jakob’s long-lost personal journals.

It is this second part that allows the reader to view Jakob from a different perspective, to see how a certain kind of sadness has permeated his life, and how he has long struggled to find his rightful place in the world.

In many ways, this book is about Jakob’s desire to put the past behind him in order to move into the future. It’s a heartfelt tale about one man’s search for happiness in the face of such enormous personal loss.

Fugitive Pieces won the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1996, the Trillium Book Award in 1996, the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1997 and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1997.

‘Fugitive Pieces’ by Anne Michaels, first published in 1996, is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, where it is described as a novel “with a difference”, adding: “Michaels employs the vocabularies of archaeology, geology, and literature to build a unique sense of personal and political history.”

Author, Book review, Children/YA, Fiction, holocaust, Morris Gleitzman, Penguin, Poland, Publisher, Setting

‘Once & Then’ by Morris Gleitzman

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Once&Then

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 249 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Morris Gleitzman is an English-born Australian-based writer with more than 20 childrens’ books to his name. This book, packaged as an “adult edition” brings together his two Holocaust novels — Once, first published in 2005, and Then, first published in 2008 — for the first time. Fittingly, it’s released today (August 6) to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

I’ll have to admit that when this one arrived on my doorstep a month or so back I was a little skeptical: surely it was just jumping on the Holocaust bandwagon already set in place by John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (both of which I loved)? What could yet another childrens’ novel tell us about the Jewish experience during the Second World War? Hadn’t it all been said before? And why wasn’t Penguin re-issuing Esther Hautzig’s true life story The Endless Steppe instead, a book I adored when I was a pre-teen and still remember with an aching fondness?

Casting my cynicism aside and holed up in my sick bed bed, I decided to give this one a go because it probably wouldn’t tax the brain matter too much. I figured I’d probably read the first 50 pages and then make a judgement call. I got so swept up in the story about a 10-year-old Jewish orphan, Felix, and his gutsy little non-Jewish friend, Zelda, that I read the book cover-to-cover in a matter of hours. And then wished I hadn’t ploughed through it so furiously because I wanted to spend more time in the company of these wonderful, inspiring characters.

A fresh perspective on the Holocaust

The beauty of Once & Then is its ability to present the Holocaust in a fresh way — that is, from the perspective of a young boy who fails to comprehend the violence and brutality around him. Of course, Boyne does this in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but Gleitzman tackles it from a slightly different angle: a Jewish boy who doesn’t even remotely understand that it is his very religion that puts him in danger.

Indeed, when the book opens Felix’s naivety is crystal clear: he truly believes he is only residing in a Catholic orphanage, not because his parents are dead, but because they are trying to sort out their problems as Jewish booksellers before coming back to rescue him.

There were two reasons Mum and Dad chose this orphanage, because it was the closest and because of Mother Minka’s goodness. When they were bringing me here, they told me how in all the years Mother Minka was a customer of their bookshop, back before things got difficult for Jewish booksellers, she never once criticised a single book.

His innocence is all the more apparent when you realise he’s being carrying this false hope with him for three years and eight months, and yet it remains undiminished. His only fear is that when his parents return they won’t recognise him because he’s changed so much in that time.

But the tables are turned when a group of Nazis arrive one day to burn all the Jewish books in the orphanage’s library. Felix suddenly realises that he needs to rescue his parents, not the other way around.

There’s a gang of thugs going round the country burning Jewish books. Mum and Dad, wherever in Europe they are, probably don’t even know their books are in danger.
I have to try and find Mum and Dad and tell them what’s going on.
But first I must get to the shop and hide the books.

This sets Felix off on an amazing voyage of discovery in which he escapes the orphanage and begins a new life on the run. Along the way, he collects a sidekick, a six-year-old girl, whom he rescues from a burning farm. Together Felix and Zelda form a formidable duo, a kind of brother-sister act that endures all kinds of highs and lows as they try to survive everything the Nazi regime has to throw at them.

A page-turning adventure

To supply any more detail would spoil the plot, because the enjoyment of reading Once & Then is letting the adventure unfurl page by page, and experiencing the adrenalin rushes, the shocks and the tears that this brings. There’s plenty of laughs in the book, too, a delightfully naive child-like humour that softens the blows of what would otherwise be a terribly dark and depressing story.

But the best part, especially for book lovers, is the infectious enthusiasm for storytelling that exists within Felix and his undying love for British writer Richmal Crompton and her humorous Just William stories.

I clamber over the beds and squeeze onto the floor and take a book from the shelf. Just William by Richmal Crompton. It’s still one of my favourite books in the whole world. As I open it I try not to remember Mum and Dad reading it to me.
Instead, I read a bit to myself. About William’s dog. He’s called Jumble and he’s a mixture of about a hundred different dogs and William loves him even when he pees in William’s new boots.
Mum and Dad said I can have a dog like Jumble one day.
Stop it.
Stop thinking about them.
William is training Jumble to be a pirate. That’s what I love about William. He always stays hopeful, and no matter how bad things get, no matter how much the world turns upside down, his mum and dad never die.
Not ever.
I know I should be getting back, but I can’t get up at the moment. All I can do is stay here on the floor, with Just William and Zelda’s carrot, thinking about Mum and Dad and crying.

Once & Then is a powerful story about the strength and resilience of the human spirit. It’s about courage and hope, and surviving against the odds. And while it tackles one of the darkest times in 20th century history, Gleitzman does it sensitively without losing any of the important detail. There’s plenty of death here, and cruelty, but it’s not sensationalist or gratuitous. “This story is my imagination trying to grasp the unimaginable,” he writes in his afterward. I think he’s achieved it.

Author, Bodley Head, Book review, Children/YA, Fiction, historical fiction, holocaust, Markus Zusak, Publisher

‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak

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BookThief

Fiction – hardcover; Bodley Head Children’s Books; 592 pages; 2007.

I may possibly be the last person in blogland to have read the much acclaimed The Book Thief, one of those children’s books that has crossed over into the adult market and become subject to incredible word-of-mouth marketing, helped, no doubt, by all the blog attention it got in 2006 and 2007. To be honest, I let it languish on my nightstand for 12 months, because I wasn’t sure it would live up to the hype. I’ve read my fair share of books about the Holocaust and wasn’t sure this one would tell me anything I didn’t already know.

But the author, Markus Zusak, has created a wholly original story. First, the narrator is death, who talks in a kind of roundabout language, part all-knowing, part creepy, part loving.

I could introduce myself properly, but it’s not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A colour will be perched on my shoulder: I will carry you gently away.

And second, the main character is an ordinary German girl growing up in Nazi Germany who must confront many personal difficulties and traumas during the course of the Second World War. This is not so much a book about the extermination of the Jewish race under Nazi occupation, but the ways in which many Germans went about their ordinary lives at the time and the extraordinary lengths some of them went to save their Jewish friends.

The story begins with Liesel Meminger, a traumatised nine-year-old girl. It’s 1939 and she has just witnessed the death and burial of her younger brother enroute to her new foster family in a town called Molching. During the burial Liesel picks up an object she finds in the snow — The Gravediggers Handbook — which sets up a lifelong love of books, even if she has to beg, borrow or steal them.

Her foster father, the kindly accordion-playing Hans Hubermann, teaches her how to read, and together the two of them pass many hours pouring over the pages of the gravedigger’s instruction manual. Later, when the family takes in a Jewish man, Max Vanderburg, and hides him away in their basement, Leisel shares her love of words with him, too.

Desperate for new reading material, Liesel — with the help of her blonde-headed friend Rudy — rescues a book from a Nazi book-burning pile. Later she is introduced to an amazing private library, owned by the mayor’s wife, which allows her to momentarily escape the dismal poverty of her ordinary day-to-day life.

But when the Nazis discover her foster father handing out bread to a march-through of Jews on their way to Dachau, their lives suddenly take on a more sinister, darker twist — which no amount of book thievery can alleviate. When the Allied bombs begin to fall on their street, things get even worse and death begins to close in on Liesel, her family and friends…

The Book Thief is, without a doubt, an incredibly memorable story. The narrative voice is unique, and the style, which double-backs on itself and occasionally jumps backwards and forwards in time, is interesting if somewhat confusing at times (Would kids get this? I kept asking myself). Initially the staccato rhythm of Death’s voice jarred, but I soon learnt to appreciate its whimsical charm.  However, I enjoyed the story much more when Death kept his mouth shut and simply let Liesel get on with things.

The characters are great, too. Liesel starts off as a rather weak-willed creature, too terrified to even step out of the car when she first arrives at her foster family’s home, but over the course of the war she turns into a feisty, courageous tom-boy, who isn’t scared of tackling anyone who bullies her. And her best friend Rudy, who has an obsession with Olympic athlete Jesse James, is a suitable, dare I say lovable, ally.

I was not as convinced about the foster parents who seemed a little stereotyped — the kindly, loving father; the foul-mouthed, bullish mother — but I can understand that younger readers would enjoy the “good cop, bad cop” personalities.

The Book Thief is a deeply unsettling story and a truly moving one. I teared up over so many scenes that I couldn’t bare to list them here for fear of running out of room! The ending is of the typical grab-your-tissues-and-sob-your-eyes-out ilk.

But in reading this very long book — perhaps a fraction too long (it meanders a lot in the middle) — I never once thought I was being emotionally manipulated. Zusak does a nice line in letting actions speak louder than words, so that the reader gets to join the dots rather than have every little thing spelt out for them. I like this approach, if only because he treats the children to which this book is aimed with intelligence rather than patronising or speaking down to them.

A delightfully human book, haunting, wise and joyous by turn. I don’t know why I waited so long to read it.

Author, Book review, Children/YA, Definitions, Fiction, historical fiction, holocaust, John Boyne, Publisher

‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ by John Boyne

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BoyInStriped 

Fiction – paperback; Definitions; 224 pages; 2007.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is one of those commercially successful cross-over books, originally written for children but now read by adults, that has been lauded by the critics and nominated for countless awards. It even has its own wikipedia entry.

I knew little about the book when I bought it, save that it was about the Holocaust and was written by an Irishman. The blurb on the back gave even less away:

The story of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is very difficult to describe. Usually we give some clues about the book on the cover, but in this case we think that would spoil the reading of the book. We think it is important that you start to read without knowing what it is about. If you do start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy called Bruno. (Though this isn’t a book for nine-year-olds.) And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence. We hope you never have to cross such a fence.

Initially, I thought the book was probably too simple for my tastes and wondered whether it was worth the effort. It didn’t take long for the short, sparse sentences and the repetitive nature of some of the phrases to wear thin. But once I got past the half-way mark, I began to feel soothed by the rhythm of the writing.

I also noted that the plot was not as straightforward as I might have thought and that there were little surprises dotted along the way. Of course, the biggest surprise — nay shock — is right at the end, although I won’t give it away. Let’s just say it’s a memorable and devastating one, and if you can reach the end without a big lump forming in your throat there may just be something wrong with you.

All in all, this is a simple book about big themes, and quite unlike any other Holocaust novel I have read before. The killer punch delivered in the final pages means I will be thinking about this story in the days, months and years to come…