Customer Reviews

And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family , Second Printing

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I spent all weekend reading "And Darkness Was Under His Feet" and I

loved it. I loved how many kinds of Jews there were, how many distinct

personalities, how many divergent journeys.

Sometimes I think we and others forget that we are not just the people

of the Holocaust. That we have lived and continue to live, for

centuries, in spite and in light of these events. That people still

had to wake up, eat, talk, relate throughout all these historical

events, to believe in a higher power or to not, to work for wealth or

not, to prove themselves to others or not, to keep going or give up.

I love that I could imagine conversations taking place between these

individuals in 1900, 1940, 1960, 2000. Ms. Dawid did a beautiful job

bringing these stories to life. Thank you for representing our people so

well in literature.

Rebecca Shine

"Papers" Producer

www.papersthemovie.com

Annie Dawid's "And Darkness Was Under His Feet" was a moving, fictionalized account of her Jewish family's history beginning before the Holocaust and bringing readers into the present. I attended a reading by Annie and heard how she created the story from many family interviews, even traveling to Europe to meet and get to know distant relatives. This book was an incredible labor of scholarship and persistence. It took years in the making. Annie's prose is beautiful and impeccable. It is poetic and a joy to read. The story begins with one family and then, as the family tree grows and spreads, the reader must keep track of more and more progeny. Annie achieves the near impossible--keeping the reader interested in the interlocking relationships. Through brilliantly sculpted scenes and realistic dialog, often humorous, she pulls the reader's imagination into the story. I never wanted to put the book down--until the last chapter. This chapter was difficult for me because Annie assembled about 50 people together at a party. (In her story, the party planners also found this gathering almost more than they could handle). I've never read a book where this was done. I was truly amazed that she could pull it off. I believe she did pull it off. She grouped her characters into pods, and those offspring and elders discussed their relationships, many of which were at odds with one another. Issues were aired, just as they might be in real life. I rate this book a "4" and not a "5" only because I "lost it" in the final scenes with so many characters kibitzing. I needed a family tree, or some kind of visual aid to keep the characters and their ancestors straight. After all that familial homogenization, the story focuses back on a single family unit. It ends in a satisfying way that made me smile. I can see why this novel won the Litchfield Review Short Fiction Prize for 2007. A masterfully crafted piece of writing!

Annie Dawid's book, And Darkness Was Under His Feet, has a richness and a depth that encompass the entire range of human emotion. In her connected stories which begin in Bukovina in 1900 and end in Paris in 2000, the world of the 20th century is shown to us as we follow the voyage of one Jewish family. It is as much a memorial to those brutally murdered in the Holocaust as it is a celebration of human resilience. It is a journey of struggle, loneliness, alienation, estrangement, tragic loss, love, happiness, laughter, and joy. It is the story of life itself.

The extended and multi-generational family, followed over a century of turmoil, persecution and diaspora from beginnings in Bukovina into a multitude of geographical locations (Berlin, Bucharest, Paris, Tientsin, etc.) is really the major character of this novel in linked stories, which is a kind of hymn to the family's endurance in spite of Holocaust and social and cultural change, and the range of observance and allegiance of its members. Yet, even if we meet many members of this family only briefly, they are sharply individualized and believable, and their differing historical circumstances are sketched with verisimilitude and deftness. The last and longest chapter, which describes the family's reunion in Paris at the dawn of the new century, is a raucous, joyous symphony with seemingly hundreds of parts. It's as if Dawid is tracing for so many of us, who may not have precise information about our own ancestors, the thread of our own pasts across the years and miles.

Anne Dawid has written a overarching diaspora of both spirit and space. In tracing a family evolution through the years prior to WWII, and its aftermath Dawid takes the reader on paths from Europe to China. Family members face a Germany held hostage by hatred yet striving to recover its past. It is also a personal story of survival and of courage in the face of a tumult of change.

This is not a book easily read and then put aside. It is a book one returns to each time with new insights the reward.

Ms. Dawid's work tugs at the heart of every immigrant family and explores in beautiful detail the generations left behind. It is a historical travelogue that sleekly moves from era to place until the reader becomes enthralled with every character.

Her descriptive words are like a magnet drawing the reader to every page, paragraph and sentence. There is a dark side but also a wonderful feeling of exuberance about survival and the constant theme of human perseverance often over chilling circumstances.

I highly recommend this book.

Sincerely,

L. Kravitz

Annie Dawid has created a collection of moving stories that follows a Jewish family for 100 years from Bukovina in 1900 to a family reunion in Paris in 2000, gathering in the family lines that were scattered in the twentieth century diaspora that followed the Holocaust. With a deft touch that is sometimes light, sometimes weighted with biblical power, always in step with the changing times, Dawid varies the length and tone of the stories to reflect not only the particular characters inhabiting them, but to provide one or two "woodcut" stories, where what has been cut out, mainly the detailed horrors of the death camps, makes the art. The experience of immigration, the threat of the Nazis, escapes, early deaths, tragically unmet expectations, all are here in well drawn and understated prose, and balanced with the instances of musical talent realized, and the sheer power of endurance shown by family members. Dawid is a master of detail, and a student of history, seeing the big picture throughout and creating characters we care about.

The first story introduces us to the family patriarch, Lazar, a product of the nineteenth century who dreams of having six healthy sons, but must settle for the three who were born after a diphtheria epidemic takes his first three. The story that ends the collection shows a family that has travelled one hundred years to a time when self-expression and fulfillment, as well as more realistic social mores, allow it to represent the new century, with a lesbian mother-to-be, spouses and significant others not only of other faiths but other races, and the whole gamut of professions, interests, and of course opinions. Dawid seems to be smiling in the telling of this last chapter and lets the narrator appear here as the family archivist.

And Darkness Was Under His Feet reverberates much the way Roots (Alex Haley) does with the complicated joy of discovering family, of finding the stuff behind the oft-told family myths. And it has the feel of a Buddenbrooks (Thomas Mann) for the modern age, wherein the family is broken, dispersed, falls on hard times. Unlike Buddenbrooks, though, in Darkness the family reassembles itself in a delightfully alive configuration of survivors who treasure the bonds of family but have created, for the most part, lives separate from the large extended brood.

Leslie Roddd

San Francisco

The hauntingly beautiful family picture of the author's young father, young grandmother and great grandmother that grace the book's cover captures the reader with a poignant foreboding when contrasted with the title, "and darkness was under his feet." Vignettes of family, friends, antagonists, business acquaintances and "authorities" unfold in focused chapters in different cities, countries, and households. These vignettes carefully placed in historic times reflect both the character of the times and the nature of the characters themselves. The individual stories are framed within the sweep of the family story as it moves forward in time from the turn of the century (1900) to the recent millennium. Horrors and joys are captured and personalized within the milieu of culture and country.

I throughly enjoyed it on the first reading and look forward to re-reading it to absorb more of the nuanced writing that I know I missed the first time through. It is rich, intricate and engaging. Rod Barringer