Shayndl and Salomea: From Lemberg to Berlin (Jewish Lives) [Paperback]

Salomea Genin (Author), Brigitte Goldstein (Translator), Wolfgang Benz (Afterword)

Book Description

Series: Jewish Lives | Publication Date: May 25, 1997

"At the age of fifty and faced with severe depression, Salomea Genin began to write about her family's history. From stories both told and untold, Genin recreates the lives of the Zwerling family in the Jewish quarter of Lvov: Shulim, her strict and deeply religious grandfather; his patient but tired wife Dvoire; and his beautiful, rebellious daughter Shayndl, who marries a dreamer against her father's wishes and without his blessing, and who will later become Salomea Genin's mother. Genin's richly detailed portrait shows the effects of a family's struggles--personal, religious, social, and for their very survival--against the shadow of the Nazi rise to power."

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Genin comments that it is the duty of the Jewish people to tell the story of their exodus from Egypt. In this memoir, she molds that philosophy to fit her own personal history. Though billed as a story of Jewish ghetto life during Hitler's rise (Genin was born in Berlin in 1932 and emigrated to Australia with her mother and her sisters in 1939), this account says little about the Eastern Europe of that era, instead focusing on her dysfunctional family in the Jewish quarter of Lemberg (Lvov). First she describes the struggles of her mother, Shayndl, to be with the man she loved and the lover's abandonment of his family. In the second half of the book, when Genin talks about her own life, she soon succumbs to the language of therapy, and the writing disintegrates. Not recommended.?Jill Jaracz, Chicago
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 138 pages
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press; Translated edition (May 25, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810111683
• ISBN-13: 978-0810111684
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,486,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars a real disappointment, January 10, 2003

By 

Yaakov Ben Shalom - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shayndl and Salomea: From Lemberg to Berlin (Jewish Lives) (Paperback)

In 1999, while living in Berlin and planning a trip to Lemberg (Lviv), I met the author and bought this memoir. I had hoped to learn a bit about Jewish life in pre-1939 Berlin and Lemberg. I was sorely disappointed.

The depiction of life in Lemberg and Berlin is superficial, but one should keep in mind how old the author was at the time of the story. The author has chosen to use her memoir as a form of cathartic therapy. She goes to lengths to portray her family negatively, and she gratuitously dwells on her psychosexual development as a child. Her psychological difficulties as an adult in Australia do not really have much relevance to the story of central European Jewry living under the shadow of doom.

Is there anything redeeming about this book? Some of the descriptions of her family's difficulties in Berlin are interesting, and the accompanying essay is not bad. This memoir is the sort of work that merits only the barest of mentions in a scholarly bibliographic essay or the bibliography of an academic work on prewar Berlin Jewry. The casual reader will likely find that he has wasted his time and money.