Tales of Grabowski: Transformations Escape & Other Stories [Hardcover]

John Auerbach (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2003

Tales of Grabowski includes two novellas, Transformations and escape, which tell the story of David Gordon, a young Jew, who transforms himself into Wladyslaw Grabowski, a Polish stoker in the German merchant marine. Auerbach balances the internal tensions between Gordon's desire to fight for revenge and Grabowski's desperate need for survival.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is the first of two books by Israeli author Auerbach (1922-2002) that will arrive in the U.S. this summer, and it's a good one. The story collection, Auerbach's English-language debut, traces the life of Polish Jew David Gordon, beginning with two novellas, "Transformations" and "Escape." Faced with liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, the 18-year-old Gordon, with the help of forged papers, becomes Wladyslaw Grabowski, a shipyard worker among the numerous non-Jewish Poles, Ukrainians and other "inferiors" used as cheap labor by the German war machine. He eventually makes contact with an Argentinian-born British spy and supplies information on the shipyard in exchange for money, tobacco, stockings and other useful black market goods. Though warned by a friend that his transformation may prove "irreversible," he suffers the presence of the "notorious, imperishable ghost" of his former self. Three shorter stories complete the volume, subtly demonstrating the lingering effects of this experience as David moves to Israel and the U.S. Told in a disarmingly plain style ("Even before he married his second wife, and long before his strokes, David's life was dominated by memories. They were bad memories: he was a survivor of the Holocaust"), the story of Gordon's life-much of which overlaps with Auerbach's own-shows that Holocaust narratives have not lost their power to illuminate humanity's darker impulses.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

With stark immediacy, these interconnected, autobiographical stories by a recently discovered Jewish writer add a new dimension to Holocaust survival literature. After witnessing a brutal roundup in his street in the Warsaw ghetto, young intellectual David Gordon escapes the horror by creating a new "monster" self and living as Wladyslaw Grabowski, a Polish shipyard worker stoking coal in Danzig, Germany. He does act as a minor secret agent for the Allies, but, far from any heroics, he sees himself as a semi-human Frankenstein, living in a tiny space between fear and chaos, fighting his survivor guilt, even as he hides who he is. "Fate favors him," and he's spared having to tell his mother about his new non-Jewish identity because he sees her deported to the camps. Combining the ironic distance of the ex-philosopher with the eyewitness account of the savage racism and oppression in daily life, the powerful narrative brings home the anguish of the survivor in a world without meaning. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: The Toby Press, LLC; 1st English Language Ed edition (May 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 190288180X
• ISBN-13: 978-1902881805
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,408,660 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A surprising find, July 20, 2007

By 

B. Grier (Statesville, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tales of Grabowski: Transformations Escape & Other Stories (Hardcover)

I stumbled upon this book by accident and was very pleasantly surprised as soon as I started reading it. It very soon became impossible to put down.

The initial protagonist is a young Jewish student of philosophy spending the early forties hanging out with his musician friends in a Warsaw ghetto. As the political scene worsens, he turns to his philosopher idols (Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Hume) as one might pray for guidance and strength to endure the horrors of watching his townspeople, and eventually his own mother, being taken away. When The Greats fail to help him, he decides to flee by obtaining false ID of a dead Polish gentile and joins a work crew that lands him in a German war machinery shipyard.

The book's power lies in his process of becoming fluent with his new self, requiring constant vigilance, especially with the challenges of authority figures, camaraderie with co-workers, handling alcohol and the unforeseen. It's very Kafka-esque in flavor, with a deep cerebral thread of mental discipline, paranoia, and reappearances of his former self as he just tries to survive while striving toward haven in Sweden.

The string of thought is so exquisitely played that you become him, and experience the slow, steady burn of anxiety so pervasive that you obsess right along with him. It reminds me a bit of Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment", especially with its ability to make you burst out laughing in the midst of a particularly dark section, but "Tales of Grabowski" has a cleaner and more navigable flow. What's even more remarkable is that it is based on his real life.

Now I can't wait to read "The Owl".

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing, August 14, 2004

By 

algo41 "algo41" (philadelphia, pa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tales of Grabowski: Transformations Escape & Other Stories (Hardcover)

Judging from the short biography on the book jacket, this is something of a roman de clef. It is a simply written, absorbing account of one man's experience of the Holocaust. The man, David Gordon, must maintain control of his emotions, despite his intense anger, and controlled emotion is the tone of this novel (which is broken up into two novellas and packaged with a short non-fiction account). David Gordon must deny his previous identity, psychological as well as biographical, to survive. Grabowski builds on this so that Gordon is sometimes talking to and actively suppressing his former personality. It is a frequently effective literary device, but perhaps a bit overdone.