6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Parents and children - Survivors in the making, November 9, 2003
This review is from: The War After: Living with the Holocaust (Paperback)
Anne Karpf is the English born daughter of two Polish Jewish survivors from the Holocaust. This book is a poignant trip into her parent's past as she struggles to come to terms with her own personal and still very present demons, inherited from her parent's war experience.
Simply written and never sentimental, this is a book about how the past can affect the future and how the children of survivors in turn must become survivors.
Jumping between her present and her parent's past, Anne gives us a vivid insight to two lives torn asunder by the brutality of war and their perpetual struggles to come to terms with the horrors they had both witnessed. Without meaning to Anne's parents passed a legacy to their children, a legacy that would culminate in Anne striving to understand her place in the scheme of Jewish survival not only in a Holocaust context but a Jewish context too.
With the birth of her daughters, Anne begins to understand her parents lives more and there is a wonderfully telling scene at the beginning of the book when Anne argues with her parents over the cold, her parents want her bundled up and kept warm, where as she sees her friends going about in thin coats and dresses. She doesn't understand why they are so preoccupied with the cold but she gives into their demands and in doing so perpetuates their fears and carries them into the next generation. Only when she begs her daughter at the end of the book to wrap up because it's "cold outside," her daughter gently responds, "No mama, I'm not cold, you are" that she understands that she has to let go of some of her fears.
This is a wonderful, well written book about Jewish lives in a non Jewish world. Anne Karpf is never accusatory or angry with her words; rather she is analytical and systematic. She writes about anti-Semitism with precise strokes, no one is blameless, both Jews and Gentiles come under her scrutiny and she puts every thing she writes in good historical context. Her life in Oxford as a student is seen through both a modern young woman's living through the 1960s as well as a Jewish woman going through an identity crisis.
I found this book an inspirational yet sombre read for a variety of reasons but the main reason was that it never tried to gloss over human fragility. Britain's lack of support for Holocaust survivor' is blunt and to the point, even Israel does not escape unscathed, as Anne's point's out, it is only recently that people acknowledge the effect the Holocaust had on a variety of people, not just those who survived the horrors of the camps and most of this has come about because of films like "Schindler's List" and "Shoah."
A final description of this book would be "an intellectual roller coaster of a ride through one woman's family history." A book worth reading.
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