Customer Reviews

Man of Ashes (Texts and Contexts)

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This is a book that must be read by anyone interested in the Holocaust and Jewish life. It is unlike any Holocaust autobiography in that it involves Jewish life in South America. Even after living through the tragedies of the Holocaust Salomon Encourages joy and happiness. As a College student, and as Salomon's grandson this book touched my life in a very special way.

This book will stay with you for some time after you read it. Fans of Primo Levi will find the approach fairly familiar, but here Isacovici pours out his whole story in a single tome. You're first transported to the carefree and then less carefree days in pre-war Romania, getting a sense of life along the river. Then the darkness sets in, and Isacovici vividly recounts his stories of surviving what's too horrific to really imagine. He's one of the lucky ones of course, making it out and ultimately arriving in Ecuador, but some injustices he witnesses there are too galling for him especially after everything he lived through.

While it's not one of the better known Holocaust memoirs, and I only discovered it in The Ecuador Reader: History, Culture, Politics (The Latin America Readers), his story is one worth remembering.