It was not until several years ago that Laura Hillman completed her Holocaust memoir, \”I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree\” (Atheneum, 2005), which reads like a teenager\’s journal of life in eight labor and concentration camps. The lyrical, brutally honest book recreates her youthful musings — echoing the most famous of the Holocaust diarists, Anne Frank.
While some admirers have envisioned Wiesenthal as a Jewish John Wayne or James Bond, the diminutive Kingsley, who has played numerous Jewish characters in his film career, including Meyer Lansky in \”Bugsy\” and Fagin in the current \”Oliver Twist,\” depicts him as a much more modest man, frail after the camps, dedicated to his work, not given to swagger or seduction.
There is a fierce anger at the core of Ruth Linn\’s work, the anger of a woman who suddenly and irrefutably discovers that the story she has been told by her Israeli teachers, Israeli society and Israeli culture from childhood onward regarding the Holocaust is but a partial narrative.
\”To write or not to write,\” Eva Gossman ponders in the first chapter of her Holocaust memoir, recounting the internal debate she had about whether to write this book. She asked many deep and tough questions: about whether it made sense, given all that has been written about the period, to write one more account; whether a personal narrative would add to historians\’ understanding; whether memory is reliable after so many years.
The hiding places in the title of Daniel Asa Rose\’s new memoir refer to the haylofts and cellars where his relatives hid from the Nazis during the war years, and also to the suburban tool sheds and coat closets where the author crawled into during his childhood in a mostly gentile Connecticut town. The title also alludes to the author\’s efforts to avoid his Judaism. Traveling to Europe to find his family\’s hiding places in Belgium and France with his two young sons, Rose comes to see that hiding places are \”not merely dark holes of concealment\” but also \”places of revelation.\” The trip leads him to understand the links between present and past, his own connections to his family\’s past and to the Jewish future.
Retired bookseller Leo Bretholz, a Holocaust survivor, can hand you his own death notice.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.