Writing the Book of Esther (French Expressions) [Hardcover]

Henri Raczymow (Author), Dori Katz (Author, Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

French writer Raczymow's powerful and haunting novel ponders the world's inaction in the face of the impending Holocaust, as well as the scarring effects of the Nazi genocide on the younger generation of Jews whose parents survived it. Esther Litvak, born in Nazi-occupied France to Polish-Jewish refugees, escapes the worst horrors of the war but commits suicide in 1975, at the age of 32, after a life of deepening obsession with the Holocaust. Named after her maternal aunt, who was deported to a death camp, Esther at age 14 dresses like a concentration camp inmate and shaves her head. Later, she fantasizes that she was an armed resister in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Writing after her death, her brother Mathieu, a French civil servant, ponders the reasons for her suicide-a tragedy that he, consumed by shame and guilt, has previously blocked from his awareness. The first half of the book consists of Mathieu's fragmentary, unfinished novel, which creates a fictive-and extraordinarily graphic and convincing-life for Esther inside the doomed Warsaw Ghetto. The second half mingles the first-person narratives of Esther's father, a Resistance fighter; of her husband, whose parents died in Auschwitz; and of her uncle, a survivor of Birkenau. Throughout the book-his first to be translated into English-Raczymow forcefully confronts the dangers of historical amnesia and personal indifference.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Mathieu's sister's suicide forces the family to confront the long-range effects of the Holocaust on future generations of one Jewish family in this hard-hitting novel of Jewish Holocaust hauntings. This achieves what few other novels can duplicate, teaching a sense of how political changes ripple down to affect the psyches of future generations. -- Midwest Book Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 204 pages
• Publisher: Holmes & Meier Pub (February 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0841913358
• ISBN-13: 978-0841913356
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,742,273 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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