Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors [Hardcover]

Melvin Jules Bukiet (Editor), Melvin Jules Bukiet (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2002

History is preserved in the memories of the survivors of the Holocaust and the imaginations of their children, the so-called "second generation". This collection of writings considers the heritage of the descendants of those who faced the horrific lie that adorned the gates of many concentrations camps - "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Makes You Free"). In the words of this anthology's introduction: "Other kids' parents didn't have numbers on their arms. Other kids' parents didn't talk about massacres as easily as baseball. How do you deal with this responsibility?" Gathered here are writings of both fiction and non-fiction, ranging from farce to fantasy to brutal realism, from an international selection of writers including Art Spiegelman, Eva Hoffman, Peter Singer and Carl Friedman.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nothing Makes You Free, prefaced by a wild-swinging, whip-smart, angry, and occasionally irreverent essay by editor Melvin Jules Bukiet, is an internationally flavored collection of prose, both fiction and non-fiction, by the descendants of survivors of the Holocaust. Bukiet contends, convincingly, that the event remains a "historic Rorschach blot"; a comet that hit at "six million miles per hour" whose waves are still spreading, and a "talismanic touchstone that every writer [Jewish or not] must genuflect toward." Contributors include Eva Hoffman, Thane Rosenbaum, Victoria Redel, Art Spiegelman, and Carl Friedman. The selections vary wildly in genre, tone, and quality, and are, as often as not, at emotional and esthetic odds with each other. But cumulatively, they successfully move the reader toward some answer to what Bukiet calls the book's "implicit question... how atrocity gets filtered through imagination." --H. O'Billovitch

From Publishers Weekly

"He isn't flying," a young boy explains about a picture he has drawn, "he's hanging. See, he's dead, his tongue is blue.... My father is there, too. Here, he is the one with the big ears." This anthology's memories and fictions contain many more moments that move and shock us. "The Second Generation will never know what the First Generation does in its bones, but what the Second Generation knows better than anyone else is the First Generation," writes Bukiet (Strange Fire), and these 30 pieces (including translations from the Hebrew, Swedish, German, French, Serbian, Dutch, Hungarian and Italian) cover a wide range of topics and emotions. In "Animal" (from Nightfather), Carl Friedman's father confesses that he wants the camp kapo he murdered to come back from the dead so that he can kill him again, but more slowly. In Sonia Pilcer's "Do You Deserve to Live," the author combines reflections on her survivor mother, her own work on a movie fan magazine and musings about Liz Taylor's conversion to Judaism in order to marry Eddie Fisher to generate original insights into the complexities of the survivor experience. The writing here is uniformly strong, intelligent and at times dazzling: Gila Lustiger's excerpt from The Inventory is a model of concise emotional story-telling, and Mihaly Kornis's short "Petition" (a sarcastic play on a legal document detailing the kind of life desired) is a wonderful conceit brilliantly executed. While some of the pieces are by noted writers such as Eva Hoffman, Art Spiegelman and Alan Kaufman, many names here will be new to readers, and the mixture of fiction and more traditional memoir is fresh as well.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 394 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393050467
• ISBN-13: 978-0393050462
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,590,753 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grow'g up w/traumatized parents makes 4 moving literature, April 30, 2002

By 

Larry Mark "editor of MyJewishBooks.com" (nyc) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (Hardcover)

Published just in time for Passover, the holiday of freedom, Melvin Jules Bukiet (STRANGE FIRE, NEUROTICA, SIGNS AND WONDERS, Professor at Sarah Lawrence) has collected some of the works of the children of Shoah survivors, the Second Gen'ers, the "2G." I was drawn to this book by its cover art, in which the sign over the gates to Auschwitz reads "NOTHING MAKES YOU FREE" instead of the actual "WORK MAKES YOU FREE/Arbeit Macht Frei". Included in the book are pieces in English and those translated into English from Italian, French, Serbian, Swedish, Hebrew, German, and Hungarian. Although these adult "CHILDREN" grew up around the world, they carry a common literary burden and can spot each other in crowded rooms. Bukiet (the son of number 108016) asks "how atrocity gets filtered through imagination." This collection helps to answer it. He writes that if the Holocaust is a historic Rorschach blot, in it the depressive can justify despair, the hopeful can find redemption, and the stupid can discern the triumph of the spirit. The collected authors grew up as children of a nightmare, children of the khurban that "is a black hole that devours the light." Bukiet explains that they lived with parents that had numbers tattooed on their arms; parents who saw their kids as replacements for murdered family members; parents whose Yiddish language was now as dead as Sanskrit; parents who appreciated life having known death (or resigned themselves to suicide); parents with cauterized tear ducts; and parents who never wasted food at the dinner table, having known hunger intimately. Their parents lived with the aftermath of atrocity and passed on these psyches to their 2G-Second Generation children (either through speaking of it always or never speaking of it). Many of the 2G authors are rage filled, angry, cynical, and distrustful. And This makes for good writing.

The authors included in the collection are, in Part 1: Carl Friedman, Eva Hoffman, Victoria Reel, Tammie Bob, Ruth Knafo Setton, Goran Rosenberg, Doron Rabinovici, Alan Kaufman, and Barbara Finkelstein; in Part 2: Savyon Liebrecht, JJ Steinfeld, Thane Rosenbaum, Henri Raczymov, Sonia Pilcer, Lily Brett, Val Vinokurov, Helena Janaczek, Esther Dischereit, and cartoonist Art Spiegelman; and in Part 3: Anne Karpf, Lea Anini, Gila Lustiger, Joseph Skibell, Leon De Winter, Alcina Lubitch Domecq, Mihaly Kornis, Peter Singer, David Albahari, Alain Finkielkraut, and the editor Melvin Jules Bukiet. I recommend that you read the authors' brief bios before starting to read the collected works. Not included are authors like David Lehman and David Curzon, who identify as 2G, but whose parents escaped Vienna in 1939; and the journalist, Joseph Berger (Displaced Persons), since he were born slightly prior to May 7, 1945.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Profound writings, July 24, 2008

By 

A. L. Dorn (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (Paperback)

The personal stories and the "fiction" in this collection were very impactful...and told a story that only children of survivors could identify with.