Although uneven (what else would one expect from a story collection and unfinished novel by a 15 year old in hiding), the best of these pieces are excAlthough uneven (what else would one expect from a story collection and unfinished novel by a 15 year old in hiding), the best of these pieces are excellent and provide an interesting complement to Anne Frank's Diary.
This collection has four types of pieces: (1) additional sketches about life in hiding that were included in the The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition published in 1995 but not in the The Diary of a Young Girl that was the original version edited by her father Otto Frank and is about 25 percent shorter; (2) realistic short stories generally set in Holland; (3) fables and fairy tales, many of which she referred to the writing of in her diary; and (4) fragments from an unfinished novel "Cady's Life." I will address each of these in turn.
The additional sketches are almost all excellent and should ideally be read in the context of the diary itself, they are each wonderfully written and observed, succinctly written, and both witty and insightful observations on every day life in hiding, including "The Dentist" about Dussel, "Sausage Day" about the making of sausages, and "Sundays" which describes each of the inhabitants lives on that day.
If you read the "Definitive" edition of the Diary already then the most exciting new writing in this collection is the realistic short stories (although some are less than fully realistic, including my favorite "Paula's Dream" about a German girl who hides in an Air Force plane during World War I, ends up flying on a bombing mission to Russia, gets shot down, is raised by Russians, and after the war has to make her way back to Germany). Like the sketches, they are well observed but they are also more the product of imagination than experience and often, like a short story, center around a particular incident and psychological shift, mostly in the manner of a Chekhov story. In addition to "Paula's Dream" I would also recommend "Roomers or Renters," "Happiness," and "Fear."
Then there are the fairy tales and fables. I wish these had been included in the Diary itself on the dates they were written because I think interspersing them with her day-to-day recollections would have more accurately captured her writing and given you the texts of the stories along with her references to writing them. In this context, however, they are mildly interesting but can also be a bit tedious and a little overly saccharine.
Finally there is "Cady's Life," an unfinished novel about a girl who has a terrible accident and ends up in a sanatorium forming a relationship with a nurse and having intense discussions about subjects like the existence of God while the beginnings of World War II are rumbling in the background. The unfinished novel is about 50 pages with a sustained opening stretch and then several fragments of unclear order. What is there was actually interesting and engaging reading and read like an actual novel, but it is all so unfinished that it leaves one both marveling at her writing but also sad that it will never been finished or fully realized....more
I always thought I had an obligation to read this, a chore to honor the dead by reading what I expected to be a stuffy, prissy, cardboard saint sort oI always thought I had an obligation to read this, a chore to honor the dead by reading what I expected to be a stuffy, prissy, cardboard saint sort of a book. Boy was I dead wrong. What an amazing writer and observer. Balanced between observation, humor, biting wit, recording events, the backdrop of the war, evolving feelings, and more. Imagining life in a Secret Annex surrounded by fear with the occasional distant events of the Holocaust recounted would make it an obligatory record of a historical moment. And all of that is there. But it is much more interesting as a girl's evolving relationship with her parents, her sister, the boy that is living with her, and her wry and humorous observations about how all of them get together. And an amazing real-time record of the maturation of her writing and observation as it is written from when she was 13 through 15. Over the course of the book Anne talks about what she is reading and studying, her passion for mythology, and more, all of which shows in the way she constructs and understands her own story.
A powerful novel that presents a wide-ranging perspective on the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. The novel begins with a German who is ordered to reA powerful novel that presents a wide-ranging perspective on the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. The novel begins with a German who is ordered to remove a statue of Felix Mendelssohn from the roof of a building the German's have turned into their own cultural center. He sends workers up to remove it but there are no plaques on the many statues so he orders them to find the one with the biggest nose. They are about to destroy it when at the last moment he realizes it is Richard Wagner. The semi-comic events unfold and depict a set of people caught up in the process who are each less motivated by evil or anti-semitism or ideology and more motivated by the penalties for not following orders. Although they eventually identify the statue of Mendelssohn and take it down, many of the initial set of characters caught up in the statue incident end punished in a variety of ways that involve being removed from Prague. The novel moves through chapters each largely focused on a different part of the process, including SS officers, heads of the Jewish Council, Reinhard Heydrich, guards, police, learned Jews, Jewish girls in hiding, a member of a quasi-resistence. At the same time, the novel moves forward in time and gets increasingly brutal and tragic as the Germans increasingly understand they have lost but only become more brutal.
Mendelssohn is on the Roof does not have some of the moral ambiguity of Primo Levi or the present the painful choices the way Eli Weisel does. The Jews, even the collaborators, all barely wrestle with their choices if at all and are presented as reasonably doing what they need to do without adding to the suffering of others. The depiction of most of the Germanys is more motivated by the fear and punishment created by the system, just like the Jews, rather than belief. Only at the very top where you have people like Heydrich are they presented as proud contributors to the horror rather than quasi-victims themselves. But I, for one, am not going to judge the perspective that Jiří Weil brings to his novel or fault it for failing to conform to the perspectives of some of the other literature by survivors....more
One of the best books so far this year, A Man Lies Dreaming by Israeli science fiction novelist Lavie Tidhar intersperses the story of "Wolf" (aka AdoOne of the best books so far this year, A Man Lies Dreaming by Israeli science fiction novelist Lavie Tidhar intersperses the story of "Wolf" (aka Adolf Hitler), a down on his private detective in London in 1939--an exile after the communists beat the Nazis in the 1933 elections--with a pulp fiction writer in Auschwitz who is fantasizing about an alternative history that is the Wolf story. The 1939 story is both an homage to hard boiled pulp as Wolf works two cases simultaneously--finding a missing Jewish girl and tracking down a conspiracy to murder the fascist British candidate for Prime Minister--while he is dogged by the police for a series of murders of prostitutes. The Auschwitz story is much shorter and is a brutal description of the concentration camp but also of the attempts to escape it with narration. And the two merge into each other as, for example, Wolf is tortured in the 1939 alternative history in ways that reflect the wish fulfillment of the concentration camp inmate. Wonderfully written, well plotted, moving, and a new perspective on the holocaust novel....more
This holocaust novel told from the perspective of a boy in the Warsaw ghetto is well executed, sometimes moving, but still falls short of what I was hThis holocaust novel told from the perspective of a boy in the Warsaw ghetto is well executed, sometimes moving, but still falls short of what I was hoping for from the reviews. Part of the problem is that although the setting and perspective are somewhat different from previous Holocaust novels, somehow it seemed to fall into the same exact patterns and thus while almost a wrenching work of history (and most of The Book of Aron feels like it could be a plausible set of events, in fact one of the main characters and his orphanage in the ghetto was real), it did nothing to expand the boundaries of the novel. Maybe that is an unfair standard, and it is certainly worth grappling with the enormity of the horror and the evil through just about all the means available to us, but somehow I felt like I had already read the book many times before....more
A well written history that focuses on Hitler's first year in power as seen through the eyes of the new American Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, A well written history that focuses on Hitler's first year in power as seen through the eyes of the new American Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, and his family. Dodd was Roosevelt's fourth choice, a liberal history professor who wanted to live within his salary in Berlin, a strong contrast to the power-obsessed Nazi's. He arrives in mid-1933 when there was still, inexplicably, a debate about Hitler's true intentions and you see his thoughts in real time as they evolve. He also brings his family and the book also includes extensive descriptions of his 20-something daughter Martha's life as she is involved with high-ranking Nazis, Russians, and others, experiencing the social life of Berlin as she goes from pro-Nazi to anti-Nazi as she witnesses the escalating violence of the SA. The book does a suspenseful and detailed presentation of The Knight of the Long Lives, Hitler's violent purge that consolidated his power and was, inexplicably again, not even condemned by the United States.
Overall, the book has the feel of well-told journalism that probably unveils new information about Dodd and his family in a reliable way but does not claim to add much to the broader history of the time. ...more
A Kindle Single about Varian Fry who went into occupied France on behalf of the State Department to rescue Jewish artists and intellectuals under threA Kindle Single about Varian Fry who went into occupied France on behalf of the State Department to rescue Jewish artists and intellectuals under threat from the Nazis, including Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt. The book explores his actions, how they were forgotten, and why the people he rescued were particularly keen to forget them. Overall well written, interesting, and an unconventional, unexpected story....more
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