From Library Journal
Langer (Holocaust Testimonies, Yale Univ. Pr., 1991) has edited a collection of personal diaries, fiction, drama, poetry, historical writing, painting, and essays about the Holocaust. In the introductions to the sections and the individual authors, he explains the historic, political, and moral framework of the destruction of European Jewry. The ghettos, transports, camps, escapes, and killings are all described. Jankiel Wiernik's depiction of Treblinka is profoundly disturbing, as are the diaries of the Warsaw, Lodz, and Kovno ghettos. Aharon Appelfeld's memorable short novel Tzili, a story about a child's wandering, is the most poignant example of fiction, while Joshua Sobel's play Ghetto and the poetry of Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and Jacob Glatstein show various attempts to encompass the catastrophe. A pitiless but necessary look at 20th-century history. For public libraries.
Gene Shaw, NYPLCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Lawrence Langer's exceptional collection of Holocaust literature includes both fiction and nonfiction, as well as drama and poetry. Among the nonfiction pieces are excerpts from the ghetto diaries of Abraham Lewin (Warsaw) and Avraham Tory (Kovno), an essay from Primo Levi's
The Drowned and the Saved, and an essay from Elie Wiesel's
Legends of Our Time. There is fiction from Ida Fink (two stories from
A Scrap of Time), Aharon Appelfeld (his short novel
Tzili), Arnost Lustig (a story from
Street of Lost Brothers), Tadeusz Borowski (a story from
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen), and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk (two stories from
Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land). There's one playwright represented, Joshua Sobol, whose
Ghetto is presented in full. Also included are 72 poems by six poets, most notably those of Nobel Prizewinner Nelly Sachs, the foremost threnodist of the destruction of European Jewry. Twenty works of art created in the Terezin concentration camp are reproduced here.
George Cohen
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