Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

This Holocaust novel is quite different from others I have read. It is difficult because of its almost sympathetic view of an SS officer who saves a young woman and her daughter (born out of wedlock - and the father was Jewish). He is a brute - that is quite clear, but there are passages that paint a human picture of him and his fears, insecurities, and frailties. But at the heart of the novel are the two women, Anna, the mother, and her daughter Trudie, who live because the SS officer takes Anna as his mistress and rather than fight it, Anna accepts the situation to save her daughter. She also aids the Resistance, through her association with a baker woman, who supplies the Nazis with baked goods and bread, while gaining access to the camps in order to assist the prisoners. Both women, mother and daughter, are so damaged and the novel charts their journey from Weimer to Minneapolis and the course their lives take and their quest to make sense of it. Anna, tries to obliterate her past and shield her daughter from the trauma, while Trudie needs to understand what happened in order to make sense of who she is.

Trudie is a history professor and takes on a Rememberance Project, wherein she interviews Germans who lived during the war. she gives them the opportunity to talk about what happened and in a way, relieve themselves of the guilt associated with the Holocaust. Through these interviews she meets Ranier, a Jew, who tricks her in a way, by responding to her quest to find Germans willing to tell their stories, and then he tells his tragic and heart wrenching story. This devastates Trudie but she seeks his forgiveness and he and she get involved in a brief, but deep relationship.

The story wraps up in a neat way - almost too neat - but I enjoyed the ending and the ultimate "resolution" of the mother-daughter conflict.

Books Started and Put Down

I hate to do this but sometimes you just have to. I started two books - both good - but put them down before I finished and started something else. One of them was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murikami. I really really like it and I will finish it but it just was taking too long and I wasn't sure it was going anywhere.

The other is the Age of Shiva by Manil Suri and I like that. too, but wanted something different. So, I am now nearly done with Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum, an historical novel about the Holocaust and the German women who abetted the Nazis to save themselves and their families. It's a fast read and very gripping.

I am in California on vacation right now and reading a lot.

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

This was just the book I have been itching to read: fast, thrilling, compelling, intriguing, and with a backdrop of Stalinist Russia and the Gulags. Right up my alley!

The book gets the reader hooked immediately with a powerful encounter between two young boys (brothers) in Stalinist Russia in 1933. The scene almost immediately fast forwards twenty years to a murder investigation in Moscow. The story unfolds quickly and with lurid details of what it was like to be one of the higher-ups, Leo, in the MGB, State Security Force, which under Lenin was the NKVD (secret police).

Leo is brought into the story to investigate the death of a young boy on the local train tracks. He is convinced that the boy was murdered, although he cannot persue this line of thought because there is no crime in the perfect Soviet society. Everyone is equal, taken care of and has no reason to be anything but happy and content. Murder is not possible in such a society.

I am not going to tell the whole plot line, but suffice it to say that this book gives a vivid portrait of life in Stalinist Russia and the fear, paranoia and violence that was rampant.

Sometimes it seemed overdone, overstated, but being a Russian major and having studied Solzhenitsyn and others, I was aware of the atrocities that took place and the repression that was part of everyday life. Some of the action is a bit far fetched, but I recall real life stories of what people can do and accomplish when under duress and when facing death.

The loose ends are all tied up neatly (too neatly?) in the end and pave the way for more thrillers from this new author.

The German Bride by Joanna Hershon

This is a very different book - a Jewish woman's journey in the westward movement of the mid 1800's. The story is interesting and fast-paced and deals with a subject area not usually depicted in "Jewish" themed books.

Eva marries, not out of love, a German Jew who went to America to seek his fortune. She is escaping a past and memories that haunt her in her native Germany. An affair with a gentile painter and the death of her sister (for which she blames herself) leads to shame and guilt and she needs to get away. Abraham Shein provides the means.

He turns out to be a gambler and womanizer and she is still haunted by her past and her guilt.

She suffers miscarriages and still births before finally giving birth to a baby girl, who she names after her sister.

She escapes finally, from her past and her husband and finds redemption in San Francisco.

A good read.

Buffalo Lockjaw by Greg Ames

Heard this author interviewed on middle of the night radio (Joey Reynolds, also a Buffalonian) and was interested for a couple reasons. He teaches at Brooklyn College, where Scott Lindenbaum went and now teaches. Figured they might know each other. Second, of course, the Buffalo connection. So, when I walked into the library, looking for something else, and found this book, I grabbed it. And it grabbed me from the start.

Deals with a young man's grappling with his mom's early dementia. She is only 56 and in a home, no longer able to live in the world. She was a bright, successful and independent woman, a nurse, who started slipping. As a nurse, she wrote about her advocacy for euthanasia in cases like hers, but no one documented or talked about it with her when SHE became the one in question.

Anyway, it's a very touching and personal story; I couldn't help wondering how much was based on truth. The writing is great.

Here are a couple passages I love:

"Four twenty-one a.m. I don't think I'll ever get to sleep tonight.

But at four thirty or so, I drift off to sleep and remain free of torment, free of suffering for almost an hour. Yet just before the sun rises, I hear them gathering again in my mind, those immaculate words spooling out...trailing multicolored threads. Mother, euthanasia, death, Brooklyn, snow."

And another:

"An old philosophy teacher of mine used to say: 'If you've got one foot in the past and one foot in the future, you're pissing on the present.' He was often drunk, but his message was sound. He stressed learning how to experience a moment. He talked about being present. Sounds easy until you actually try to do it."

Anyway, this book made me sad, and it made me think and it made me want to make my feelings very clear for my children so they don't ever have to go through what the main character in this book did. I need to make my living will. 

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

When I first started reading this book, I was sucked right into the story line and the amazing writing style. But about half way through, I lost the same level of interest that I first had. I think because the book should have been read quickly, within a day or two. I recognize that it was an amazing piece of writing, but I think I just did not relate enough to the character and to the cricket theme. At first, I thought I understood why the author chose cricket as a focus. The book dealt with coming to terms with being unAmerican in America. And cricket is a "second class" sport in America, but not in so many other parts of the world. Anyway, I am glad that I read the book, but would like to have someone who has read it to discuss it with. Maybe it's time for me to join a book club.....

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Captivating book. I felt so ignorant about India reading this book; I felt like one of the villians, actually, that my vision is so narrow ... that I am so wrapped up in my "easy" life that I deflect thoughts of how most of the world lives. This is really an Indian's scathing indictment of India - despite the gains the country has made economically, it still remains corrupt and backward. This book is a social commentary that was met with derision by many in India.
The journey for the main character from servitude to entrepreneurship was accomplished, unfortunately, through the same corrupt means that his boss employed to attain and keep his position. So Balrain escapes from "the Darkness" but at a cost. He does not, however, treat his drivers the same way that his boss treated him.
This is a very cynical look at society and doesn't offer up much hope that those who want to elevate themselves from "the Darkness" can do so without becoming like those that that have enslaved them. I was unaware that the lower caste Indian people are much like the serfs in Russia; their servitude seems to be part of their persona and freeing themselves from servititude is something that they are not comfortable with.

For me, it was enlightening and of course, disturbing, and helped me understand the Indian and the caste system better.