Customer Reviews

Our Holocaust

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Gutfreund breaks a taboo, writing a novel about the Holocaust, one that is couched in the accoutrements of veracity, such as a first person narrator bearing the same name as the author. The entire read, one toys with the question of what is real and what is made up. As it turns out - most is made up. Still, a book very hard to put down.

In a move reminding me of Vikram Seth in Two Lives, Gutfreund feels a need to distance himself from those nationalists and right-wingers who gather political points from the near annihilation of the Jewish people. Many would maintain that the nations of the world allowed the establishment of Israel because of their bad conscience regarding the Holocaust. So, if Seth spends a page or two decrying Bush and Israel and celebrating eco-politics, Gutfreund makes the more daring move to impugn all the Israelis (besides himself of course, a distinction he makes very clear, even fantasizing having his head split open in the town square for his enlightened beliefs) as being able to commit the Holocaust upon Israel's "minorities" (aka Palestinians). He views himself and those surrounding him as on some eternal brink, in an everlasting 1939, on the eve of a new Holocaust.

I question the morality of such a complete smudging of boundaries between victim and criminal (even if this conclusion is resurrected later on in the book in order to maintain that both victims and perpetrators were ordinary folk - part of a tired academic argument regarding whether Germany's path to genocide was a "Sonderweg" or "special way" or whether it was something more common). And he keeps struggling with his own conclusion throughout the book, as though his very innards rebel against believing the same. Thought-provoking, and I hope very wrong. In the words of Orwell: "There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them."

Israeli prize winner Amir Gutfreund debuts with an astonishing chronicle of two young children's abilities and inabilities to understand what happened "over there" in Our Holocaust.

The author takes the stage as a fictional character along with Effi, the only other child on Katznelson Street in Kiryat Haim. As members of the second-and-a-half generation to the Shoah (the Holocaust), they try to fit the pieces of the puzzle together--from the bits and pieces they are given--because they are not "Old Enough" to comprehend.

Amir is the more questioning of two, begging for stories and information. Fifty years may have passed but the Shoah's survivors are still haunted. As the children age and become "Old Enough" to learn the truth, Amir becomes obsessed with learning more. He interviews the family--everyone who survived is now a relative, not so much as by blood as shared experiences--and collects their stories.

One of the more unusual characters is Attorney Perl, not for what he remembers or what he experienced in the camps. He, too, keeps records. Not about the atrocities, but about what happened to those who committed them. What happened to the Nazis after liberation? Ask Attorney Perl. Behind the wall of his hardware store is a wall of little drawers. Amir at first believes they contain the store's inventory, but when he's finally "Old Enough," he learns that the drawers are crammed with index cards full of notations, sentences, releases, and deaths of Nazi party members.

Our Holocaust takes readers on two voyages. One is through the minds of the survivors and their children, and another is through the camps. It takes readers through the ghettos where the Nazis perform the "Aktions" and the "Selektions" of who stays, goes, and who dies on the spot.

Our Holocaust is not an easy read. It's frightening. It's horrific. It puts faces on the people in the documentaries that have aired over the years.

Armchair Interviews says: While Our Holocaust is not an easy read, it's a must-read to even begin to understand exactly what happened "over there."

Once you start reading it, you find yourself enchanted. Well written and not at all horrific. The subject is a difficult one, but the author makes you smile, laugh, cry, and feel human for better or worst. Amir G is one of the most promising authors in Israel! A must read book!

If you want to understand the origin of the complexity of a nation built from pain and conflicting one, based on humanisem and neglecting some - you must read this one to.

Amir Gutfreund and Jessica Cohen, his gifted translator, wove the sunshine out of the pouring rain of the Shoah. Wondrous book, bewitching sentences.
Verónica Albin

Its hard to believe but this is a feel good Holocaust book. The author loves the characters in the book. Two children are trying to figure out the secrets the adult Holocaust survivors in their small town are hiding.
The whole book is totally charming and life affirming even when painfull.

An absolute must-read. ". . . there isn't as much black and white in the world as we would like." p. 371. This book touched me deeply and I am grateful to Amir Gutfreund for taking the time to do this. An important work.

As the last survivors of the Shoah leave us, along with their tormentors and liberators, we are losing first hand witness to the greatest evil perpetrated by humankind. Histories, works of social science, political science and psychology will continue to be published raising new theories and questions that are important but fail to communicate the depth of the experience. For this, we must turn to personal history and literature. "Our Holocaust" is story of one man's attempt to understand the inconceivable by tapping the collective memory of his family. His "family", has he calls it, was formed out of the remnants of survivors who were not related but formed a family based upon mutual close relationships and ties during the aftermath. This, the author calls the "law of compression." As the narrator grows up his childhood, curiosities mature into a quest to understand and immortalize the experience of the individual survivor and those that did not survive. The book should be approached with awe and reverence as the author masterfully unfolds the holocaust experience for the reader as his narrator discovers and ties together bits and pieces. The generations of Jews and Israelis would be profoundly affected by this collective of individual horrors and miracles. No one book can capture all that was the holocaust. This is an important and well-written work. Without spoiling the book for the reader, I believe the following excerpt captures the author's intent:

"Those sadists, I understand. It is not them that I fear. People like them are hiding everywhere around me today. I can guess who they will be and where they will come from if what-happened-there-happens-here-to. What frighten me is the ones who maintained their integrity. The people-who-did-not-hate-Jews. Those people, I cannot understand, and I have no idea where they will come from."

Such is the current position of Israel in the sea of hate we call the Mid-East.

Our Holocaust is a fiction work by Amir Gutfreund that will make you stop & think about the things we take for granted today. World War II was 60 years in the past, but in many, many ways it still lives fresh in our memories today. Even those who have not lived long enough to remember these events will certainly have felt the impacts of them. Growing up as a second-generation holocaust survivor, as this book depicts, was a difficult journey with very conflicted messages. The protagonists best intentions of researching & documenting the terrors of the holocaust come back & haunt him near the end of the journey as he discovers that his wife is related to one of the figures he has researched & hated. His anger & resentment are hard to push back, but bring back echoes of an evil past which smouldered & burned into the atrocity of the holocaust. A message to all of us---hatred is not an admirable attribute, no matter cause.