Customer Reviews

Life with a Star (Jewish Lives)

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

 

 

I read 'Night' by Elie Wiesel, and although I sensed the horror of the Holocaust, I didn't actually feel it. Some time later I read 'Life with a Star', and finally felt it, deep inside. This book is an incredible description of a Jew's life outside the camps during the war. I highly recommend it.

Why this gem has not received the recognition it deserves in the publishing world is impossible to understand. Now available in America; finally. An important testament to the Houlocaust, and, in a larger sense, to humanity... to hope... Sweet & terrible; austere, beautiful, humbling. You will want all of the people you love to read it, too...

Unlike many survivor's accounts, Weil's novel (which I assume from the biographical material prefacing this work is probably quite autobiographical) does not deal with any aftermath to the Holocaust. The book breaks off just as the narrator chooses to hide and therefore conitnue his fight against the never-named but omnipresent "them."

The rapacity and cunning of "them" remind you of Art Speigelman's "Maus," and I wonder if he read this novel earlier. The picture of daily life outside the camps is told with details which constantly circle back to the narrator's lost (married) lover, and understandably, these obsessions only fade gradually, as the transports impinge more directly upon the Jews.

The metaphor of the circus, in which the only animals are people, is sustained admirably in this section of the novel, and the translation conveys well the bare irony of the minimalist style. Almost childlike in its observations, the tone of the novel may be off-putting to some readers wanting more elaborated insight. It took me about sixty or seventy pages to get used to the rhythm, and only in the halfway point did it fully compel me. But I read it in one sitting.

Why? By its steady momentum, you are carried into the horror even as it does not overwhelm you. Through the control of the protagonist, you too gain control over the situation, and resolve to resist the temptation to give in to complacency.

The characters remain in your memory: Roubitschek and his onion, the narrator's almost comic aunt and uncle who blame the whole Nazi invasion it seems on their nephew, Ruzema's memory, and most of all, Tomas the cat. Rarely has a pet assumed such an evocative place in such a story. The daily task of finding food when you can buy so little. The scene of the names being called for transport in the synagogue, the depictions of the grave digging detail, the narrator's shattered home, and the growing despair that battles against the realization that the slow advance of the Allies means that people "out there" are actually fighting to save the narrator: all these add up subtly to a powerful testimony.

The narrator must wear a star that shines only at day, that gives no warmth, that is pinned over one's own heart, but over the course of the novel, he realizes that his status as the "other" frees him (almost like a Camus character) to live.
Worthy of comparison to Imre Kertesz' "Fateless," and Primo Levi's memoirs, this overlooked novel deserves much wider attention. Read it and see why.

Weil takes his character Josef Rubicek through budding romance, poverty on the outskirts, danger, demeaning treatment, and the daily effort to survive, in Prague during the Holocaust. Rubicek is slow to understand what is happening around him, but eventually realizes the significance of the regulations that get announced daily, the restrictions that are put on his world, and the anguish of those he encounters. It's a very moving book throughout, even when Rubicek is lost in reveries over a romantic liaison which has been ended by the authorities.