Customer Reviews

Tales of Grabowski: Transformations Escape & Other Stories

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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".

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.