Book Review: Skeletons at the Feast

Why have I not read anything by Chris Bohjalian before? Skeletons at the Feast is my first, and I'm excited to have a long string of other Bohjalian novels to read. In this novel, World War 2 is coming to an end, and the Emmerich family—or what is left of it—begins the journey across the war-torn Nazi Germany to reach the British and American lines before the Russians catch up with them. Along with the Emmerichs, a Prussian artistocratic family, are a Scottish POW and a Wehrmacht soldier, who is really a Jew who escaped a train headed to Auschwitz.

Woven in with the story of the this group of refugees is the story of a group of Jewish women who are forced to march from one concentration camp to another as the war winds down. I read a lot of World War 2 novels, and the description of these women is exceptionally powerful.

I am teaching a class right now to middle schoolers that focuses on World War 2 literature through various perspectives. We've read Number the Stars (Danish resistance); Snow Treasure (Norway); and will read Sadako and the 1000 Paper Cranes (a Japanese girl after the atomic bomb). I really appreciated Bohjalian's bringing several different perspectives together in one novel: traveling together are former Nazi supporters, a Scottish POW, and a Jew. Along the way they meet all kinds of people, and ultimately cross paths with the group of women from the concentration camp. I loved all the mixing of perspectives.

For a great list of World War II reading, be sure to check out War Through the Generations. Some of my other reviews include:
Day After Night by Anita Diamant
Sarah's Key
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
I Have Lived a Thousand Years
The Nazi Officer's Wife
Jimmy's Stars (Mary Ann Rodman)
When the Emperor Was Divine (Julie Otsuka)
Briar Rose (Jane Yolen)
Night (Elie Wiesel)
The Book Thief (Marcus Zusak)
The Endless Steppe (Esther Hautzig)

Book Review: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

I found John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas on one of those "listmanias" on amazon.com, as I was looking for favorite middle-school readers. Of all the YA books I've read in the past month, this has been close to the top.

The story takes place in Auschwitz, where nine-year-old Bruno moves with his parents and sister. Unlike most stories of the Holocaust, however, Bruno is on the other side of the fence: his father is a high-ranking Nazi officer. After months of wondering who all those people in striped pajamas are at the camp (he can see one small section from his bedroom window), Bruno sneaks over to the fence and meets a boy his age. They strike up a friendship that Bruno knows must be kept secret, even though he doesn't understand what is happening. The story, of course, has a devastating ending.

The book is flawed historically for various reasons. By age nine, for example, Bruno surely would have understood the word "Jew." Perhaps if he were 5 or 6 in the novel, his innocence would be believable; but a nine-year-old is old enough to really be taught to hate. And surely the son of a Nazi officer would have been fed a steady diet of hatred.

But I didn't care. I liked believing that a child could be so pure and innocent that he didn't know what was going on. I liked how he calls Hitler "the Fury" and Auschwitz "Out-with." My own eight-year-old still has moments when he realizes that a word he always thought was pronounced one way is really wrong ("Grape-Grandpa" instead of Great-Grandpa).

I love the perspective of the Holocaust from Bruno's view. This was so different from any other Holocaust novels I've read. I'd recommend this to ages 12 and up, only because the ending is so devastating. I think it would be a great introduction to talking about the Holocaust.

Book Review: Sarah's Key

Although it began with an abandoned book and then one I barely made it through, January has ended up being a phenomenal book month. First there was The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, then The Other Side of the Bridge, and now Titiana de Rosnay's wonderful Sarah's Key. How can the next 11 months compete?

Sarah's Key tells the story of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, as she does research for an article about the virtually unknown 1942 round-up (called the "Vel d'Hiv incident") of French Jews by the French authorities. Jarmond is horrified to discover that these 13,000 men, women, and children were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. During her research she finds that her in-laws have a link to one of the Jewish families, and her investigation reveals a terrible discovery.

Alternating chapters with Julia's modern-day story is the story of Sarah Strazynski, a 10-year-old Jewish girl in 1942. Sarah attends school, wears pretty clothes, and takes piano lessons as most of her French friends do and hasn't the slightest idea why she must wear the yellow star upon her clothing—and why that makes her different. One summer day her world is shattered when her family is torn apart by the Vel d'Hiv. Sarah's courage and resourcefulness save her for awhile.

Ultimately the two stories intersect and become one. de Rosnay is a wonderful writer. Her characters are crafted well and she envokes compassion without ever being sentimental. After reading this I'm curious as to find out more about Vel d'Hiv and also to find more books by de Rosnay.

Other Reviews of Sarah's Key:
Gautami at the Reading Room here
She Is Too Fond of Books here
Caribous Mom here
A Reader's Respite here

Book Review: Briar Rose

I seem to be continuing my theme of Holocaust literature this past year, without any conscious intent. Jane Yolen's Briar Rose (1992) is the story of a granddaughter's search for her grandmother's mysterious past. For all of her life, Becca and her sisters have heard only one story from their grandmother, Gemma: the story of Sleeping Beauty (Briar Rose), told with a haunting twist. After Gemma dies, Becca is determined to find the true meaning behind the fairytale.

Her search takes her to Poland and the gruesome extermination camp Chelmo. This is when the story gets good. Horrifying and painful, but well written. The first half of the novel was frankly somewhat annoying. Sandwiched in between interesting chapters about Gemma were seemingly insignificant chapters that featured catty fighting and nitpicking between Becca and her two flat, stereotypical sisters--both present day and in flashbacks. I have no idea why Yolen included this meaningless subplot. It was a huge distraction to me. I wish she's concentrated more fully on developing the characters of Becca and her grandmother. There is probably some "wicked stepsister" allusion here, but it was not effective.

But if you can get past that, the story itself is good. The experiences described at Chelmo and with the partisan fighters outside the camp added a new dimension of the Holocaust experience for me.

Another review of Briar Rose: Natasha at Maw Books.
Other Holocaust-themed books reviewed here: I Have Lived a Thousand Years (Livia Bitton-Jackson), Night (Elie Wiesel), The Book Thief (Marcus Zusak), The Nazi Officer's Wife (Edith Hahn Beer), The Endless Steppe (Esther Hautzig).

Book Review: I Have Lived a Thousand Years

Livia Bitton-Jackson was once Elli Friedmann, a carefree 13-year-old who is just becoming interested in boys, who experiences typical relationship difficulties with her mother, who adores her father. But in March 0f 1944, she became one of millions of Holocaust victims, and this is her story of unbelievable survival in the worst of circumstances. From "Hey Jew Girl, Jew Girl" to "Can I Keep My Poems, Please" to Auschwitz to "Mommy, There's a Worm in Your Soup" to "It's an American Plane," the chapters are short, gripping, graphic, and heartbreaking.

I came away from this book astonished, once again, at the ability of someone to maintain faith, hope, and perseverance in the face of cruelty and suffering. In the ghetto, before concentration camps, Elli sees the good:

"For the first time in my life, I am happy to be a Jew. And I am happy to share this particular condition of Jewishness. The handsome boys, lively women, beautiful babies, gray-bearded old men—all in the same yard of oppression, together."

In other places, Elli thanks God for respite from tragedy: the ability to drink filthy water, her mother's healing, a breath of air. Truly remarkable.

This book listed for young adult readers, but adults should not pass this up. This book, Zusak's The Book Thief and Elie Wiesel's Night, make a powerful trilogy of Holocaust reading. Another Holocaust memoir I've read in the past year is The Nazi Officer's Wife, which tells the story of how the author became a "U-boat": an Austrian Jew who went underground and emerged in Munich as an Aryan. All of these memoirs are painful, heartwrenching reads, but I think they are essential. We cannot become complacent; we cannot relegate these events to history.

Book Review: The Nazi Officer's Wife

July 15, 2007

Subtitled "How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust," this memoir is the story of the author's life prior to the Holocaust and then during the war, as she became a "U-boat": an Austrian Jew who went underground and emerged in Munich as an Aryan. Author Edith Hahn Beer chronicles the amazing years of survival that demanded her to shed her former identity and live and work side-by-side with the despised Nazis.

The book starts with a slice of her life in Germany as a Red Cross nurse known as "Grete" and then tells the story of her previous life in Vienna, where she was just one examination away from becoming a lawyer before the Gestapo forced her family into the ghetto. Until the time when she received the yellow star on her chest, she hardly thought of herself as Jewish. "I think my father knew how to be Jewish, but he did not teach us. He must have thought we would absorb it with our mother's milk." Later in the book she describes one Hanukkah at the labor camp, when she and her fellow workers decided to make a menorah. "But then, to our horror, we found not one of us knew the prayer--not one. Can you imagine? To be so bereft, so ignorant of our own culture, our own liturgy! This was the legacy of our assimilated life in Vienna."

Edith spends a year in a labor camp and is then due to be deported. She decides then that she will risk capture to stay with her fiance in Vienna, and she rips off her yellow star and goes into hiding. Eventually her boyfriend, out of terror, ends things with her, and she flees to Munich with a new identity. Once in Germany, she takes on a whole new self.

This book, which was on my list for Semicolon's Saturday Book Review challenge, is heartwrenching and fascinating. She is a powerful writer and succeeds in relating to the reader how people will do impossible things to survive and to protect those they love.

Book Review: The Endless Steppe

May 11, 2007

This Sonlight Core 7 novel has been given the "best Sonlight book ever" designation by my kids. The Endless Steppe is author Esther Hautzig's narrative of the 5 years she spent in Siberia as a Polish-Jewish exile during WWII. Hautzig is a master storyteller. At age 10 she and her parents went from a completely normal life in Vilna, Poland, surrounded by dozens of family members, to being outcast in a barracks in Siberia. The five years spent in exile are filled with the daily struggle of finding food, clothing, and shelter. This was one of the books, too, that spanned the ages of my kids. While written for a young adult, the novel was appropriate for my 4th-grader, as well, and even my kindergartener listened in now and then. And a warning for those moved to tears by Sonlight books: get your tissues out for the last few chapters.