Customer Reviews

Walk the Dark Streets

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Two thumbs up! This book was a positive influence on me, being Orhtodox Jewish. It was also a positive influence on my best friend who is Christian. The story is perfectly set following one girl through her troubles of WWII.

I read this book when I was 13. I am now 14. I understood this book and its message, and did not find it unsettling. However, people older than me can appreciate it as well. It is a beautifully written book that does not hide the pain and hardship of this time in history.

The reader is brought back to the terror filled days and months that engulfed the Jewish community as the full impact of Nazi power became apparent - a gradual, relentless process that escalates suddenly with Kristallnacht. As the day to day events unfold, the reader is swept up in the personal terror and loss that each of the characters feel. It is a wrenching, beautifully written story. Older teens and adult readers alike will be captured by this book.

this is NOT a children's book. this is a misclassification. should be for high school and college age readers!

This haunting, sad book must be read. Eva is a young German Jewish girl. She lives with her parents and grandfather in a comfortable apartment, and life is good. Until the Nazis come to power and everything changes. Her father, a bookseller, must give up his store. Her grandfather dies. She can no longer go to school or see her non-Jewish friends. Everything seems forbidden. Can Eva's family find a way out or are they doomed?

Edith Baer escaped the Nazi's and came to America in her teens, the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. The two young adult novels A Frost in the Night and its sequel Walk the Dark Streets are a very close but fictional retelling of her own experiences growing up in 1930's Germany.

I enjoyed A Frost in the Night and was looking forward to reading the sequel. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy Walk the Dark Streets nearly as much. Whereas the first book takes place in a relatively short period of time (a year), the sequel is spread out over seven years. Each chapter covers about nine months. Such a whirlwind tour is hard to sustain in a meaningful way. The plot jumped along jerkily, and it was hard for me to see Eva grow significantly along the way.

In addition, due to the increasingly violent society about which she is writing, Baer's language lacks the same quality which made her bucolic descriptions of pre-Nazi Germany so attractive. Her writing in the sequel seems flat in comparison.

Amazon classifed this as children's fiction but I am an adult reader and I found this book as well as the author's previous one, A frost in the night, one of the most moving I have read about the Holocaust (both fiction and nonfiction). The way she personalizes the entire experience of living under the Nazi regime through the Bentheim family is far more effective than shocking statistics or outright descriptions of atrocities. She leaves to the imagination what happened to relatives taken away to Dachau, etc., making it all the more frightening to the child Eva, because it is unknown. I have the feeling Ms. Baer's work is at least partly autobiographical, but she is also a superbly talented writer and I hope she will provide us with a third book in this series.

A Walk in the Dark Streets is about a girl named Eva Bentheim who is a girl living in the time of the holocaust, and how hard it was for Jews living in Germany. Eva is a regular Girl in a regular girl living in a very messed up Germany. She meets a boy who's name is Arno and when her father gets taken to jail to go to the K.Z. (a concentration camp) her relation ship with him saves her father. The next day another war for WWII has begun and worse still Eva needs to find a way out of Germany! I did not enjoy this story very much because all of the Jewish words, the romance, and there was no moral to it.