Customer Reviews

Reunion: A Novella

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This small but powerful novella is a striking and stunning story. It is the story of a young Jewish boy in Germany whose new classroom member is from an aristocatic family. This new boy is immediately popular due to his good looks, intelligence, athletic abilities, and family standing. The young Jewish boy realizes that given his own stature and desire to befriend the new boy will be a difficult task. He successfully makes great efforts to distinguish himself as a scholar. This results in a close friendship between the two boys. Given the new boys family status the Jewish boy is limited as to how much of this world of his new friend he can be a part of. The young Jewish boy is painfully aware of these limitations. The resulting Nazi domination and war bestows powerful changes in this friendship leaving feelings of betrayal and loss. The young Jewish boy painfully lives with these feelings. The ending was the most powerful I had ever experienced in a book. It was totally unsuspected and shocking. The book caused much thought provoking that has permenantly stayed with me.

I read this novella after I saw the film on Bravo. As good as that was the book is a hundred times better. Uhlman depicts a beautiful friendship between to young men that is ravaged by the insane hatred that was so prevalent during the Third Reich. In such a short work Uhlman is able to create characters that are entirely fleshed out, entirely real. The ending is a killer. I highly recommend this title.

A short, excellent novella about the relationship of two boys on the eve of Hitler's rise to power in Germany. On of the boys, Hans Schwarz--the narrator--is the son of a doctor (and former officer in the Imperial Army), a descendent of rabbis and shopkeepers, whose German roots go back hundreds of years, and whose Jewishness is little more than a matter of heritage, not faith. He feels himself to be as German as anyone can be, but even moreso, like many Germans, a citizen of a region (in this case Swabia), of which he is fiercely proud. At school--and exclusive school for the elite--he befriends Konradin von Hohenloh, a member of one of the most noble of aristocratic families. Despite their difference, a friendship ensues--but is brief and idyllic. Soon the outside world, of which they had remained largely ignorant, begins to creep into their lives, and their friendship is unalterably effected.

Reunion is an excellent short study of this tragic time, and I highly recommend it to everyone.

and Reunion is the most perfect, delicate small great jewel I have ever found ( Only 120 pages and Prologued by another genius )
It delves deeply into the moral aspects of the human soul, while weaving a unique friendship among 2 worlds represented by 2 teenagers in the pre Second War World, in Dusserldolf: A jew and a German...
If you aprecciate deeply the delicacy and talent of a friend...make him/her this amazing gift of love

I read some of the other reviewers' comments before buying this book. I thought: 'come on...! it cannot be that good'. I was wrong, Reunion's even better than that. The book was a delight to read, but the ending devastated me like no other book in 30 years of reading has even come close to. I cannot think of anything (Tolstoi's Hadji Murad, Kafka's Concerns of a family man, Shakespeare's Lear) that has the same emotional impact of this little book. I know, I know... It's too much. Well, read the book and see.

A simple tale that leads you along the edges of evil, the ugly gratuitous possibilities that lurk within the human personality, and also reminds you breathtakingly that each person is an opaque mystery. A very important read for an evil-infatuated age.

"Reunion" is beautifully written, with some passages reading almost like poetry. That may seem strange for a novella focused on the events of World War II and its impact on two particular friends. In some ways, it reminded me of A Separate Peace. The story involves two boys at a school for boys. They become friends despite their differences and then there is an act of betrayal. All of this occurs on the eve of World War II. In the case of "Reunion," it was particularly nice, for a change, to get a feel for the German countryside and way of life in the years before Hitler's rise.

Still, I wish the author had chosen to lengthen the story, for the last third of the novella seemed to be a too-quick summary and it brought me up short. After dawdling in the description of pre-war Germany and particularly the lengthy build-up to the friendship between the sixteen-year-old Jewish boy, Hans, and the similarly aged Konradin, a Protestant son of a prominent Swabian family, I wasn't prepared for the quick shifts that followed.

In any case, for a story that gets at the heart of the tragedy of World War II without making the reader wallow in its evils, Reunion is well worth the short time required to read it.

Having first read this novella in German translation, I was so much impressed with its superb stylistic quality, as well as terse truthfulness (I grew up in Hitler-Germany and am well aware of what Mr. Uhlman is talking about), that I ordered the English original, simply to let friends and acquaintances gather an idea about that dark era in history.

Arthur Koestler has called this novella "a minor masterpiece." He writes, "[The use of the word 'minor'] was meant to refer to the small size of the book, and to the impression that although its theme was the ugliest tragedy in man's history, it was written in a nostalgic minor key" (Introduction, Fontana Books edition, 1977). Having now read this amazingly moving journey of a friendship, I can only agree with Koestler's assessment of this work as a masterpiece. Mr. Uhlman has keenly expressed the depth of friendship with all of its joys and fears. His descriptions reminded me of the beauty of Hesse's own romantic language: "...the Black Forest where the dark woods, smelling of mushrooms and the tears of amber-colored mastic, were threaded through by the trout streams with sawmills on their banks." Mr. Uhlman has also deftly expressd the philosophical wanderings of two young men who attempt to find meaning in the world around them as their understandings are transformed because of the naturalness of their friendship. This terribly good story is not over-emotional, nor melodramatic. It conveys some seriousness and a touch of irony. This is indeed a marvelous--albeit brief--masterpiece.

I read this (short) novel originally as an assignment in high school, more than twenty years ago. It moved me then, and as I reread it today I still think is a powerful book. The protagonist of the story is Hans Schwarz, a Jewish boy in high school in the Germany of the early 30s. Hitler is about to take power. The novel narrates as the boy (and his family) slowly starts suffering creeping discrimination, from the teachers and from his fellow students. One of the few friends he has is the aristocratic Konradin von Hohenfels (clearly inspired by Hitler would be assassin Claus von Stauffenberg, as it becomes clear in the last pages of the book). There's not much to it plotwise, but what I like about the book is the sad, melancholy undercurrent throughout the book, as we see a tragedy slowly happening. The book is written as if it were an autobiography, but it is not. Author Fred Uhlman was born in 1901, so it was impossible for him to be a schoolboy in the early 1930s. Note: in 1989, a not so good film version of the novel starring Jason Robards was made.