Customer Reviews

Karpstein Was Hiding: Pieces of a Life

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I feel as though I know Karpstein personally. Reading this book, I was struck by the evocative prose and how the story held my interest as it wove a tale of a person that many Jewish Americans would recognize. The book creates a world that is familiar, and yet foreign, as in a dream; it is a synthesis of the monochromatic city (New York?) with its air vents and subways, and that vague sense of being pursued that many Jews feel instinctively (and for good cause), plus supernatural elements that rise from the landscape like subtle delusions.

This novel is a work of Jewish magical realism, in my opinion; does this genre exist?

It is sad, in places, and sometimes angry; but it is not bleak -- the author has even found some room for humor. I recommend it to anyone interested in the Holocaust, in Jewish-American fiction, and in hearing a new voice with something very interesting to say about survivor guilt.

I wept when I followed this man through his hidden passageways. I wept tears of recognition. Karpstein is of my generation and I am of his. We are a generation with a secret pain. Karpstein and I--and millions of others--heard of the holocaust and the pogroms, knew of them, learned about them; all from a great distance. We were afraid and hurt and angry--from a great distance. We were and are frustrated at the horrors we could not do anything about. Thank G-d that most of us chose life. Most of us came out into the sunshine. Karpstein stands for the thousands who were survivors who didn't survive. Karpstein's flight into the darkness serves to remind us of the hiding part of our generation; of those who were eaten by the distant monster. Karpstein Was Hiding is a beautiful river of language that sometimes seems like a long poem. It has been created with a craftsmanship that one seldom sees in modern writing. Once you have read it you will give Karpstein a hiding place inside your own mind.