Book Description
Facing The Lion is an inspiring autobiographical account of a young, non-Jewish girl standing up for her beliefs in the face of overwhelming pressure to conform to the Nazi propaganda machines. Simone refuses to accept the Nazi party and her simple acts of defiance lead her to be persecuted by her school and local officials, and ignored by friends. She is put in a harsh reform school until the end of the war.
Customer Reviews:
Simone is a real survivor.......2007-10-04
This book is a first hand account of a young girl who had what it took to survive her horrible experience under the Nazi's. What she "had" was her religion. It is amazing to me that the large amount of Jehovah's Witnesses came through those war years able to cope with life after the war. So many others (in the camps) had no means of doing so. What J.W.'s have is nothing short of a miracle, as I have seen for myself. My 18 yr. old son and I met Simone and her husband at their home in France this past winter. The first thing Max did was to show us the number tattooed on his arm.Then he said to my son, "young man, I watched a 1000 people being put to death every day". Yet, here he stood, just out of the hospital the day before, still bright and full of life and love for his faith, at over 90 yrs. old. Next on my list is his book which I hear is just as inspiring as his wife's.
Young Girls Life interrupted by Nazie terrorists!.......2007-07-14
This young girl suffered so much at the hands of the French, who sided with the Nazies.
She was French and they took her away from her parents and put her in a terrible reform type school.
This book enlightened me as to how horrific that these Jehovahs Witnesses were treated and only because of their deep religious convictions.
It brought many tears to my eyes at how the innocent ones suffered.
outstanding faith.......2007-04-15
what faith this young girl showed with the help of her God ! A ggod example for all who face adversity.
Couldn't put it down........2007-01-10
I read this one in a day. Easy read. I especially liked the fact that it tells Simone's whole story, not just the bad parts. I enjoyed hearing of her life before and after the Nazi era. As a parent I found an excellent example in her parent's training of Simone. I suggest everyone should read this one. I encouraged my teenage daughter to read it and she did. Her faith as well as mine was strengthened. Simone proves you do not have to be superhuman to do the right thing.
The faith of a little girl.......2007-01-10
I was very impressed that a girl of just 11 years of age, taken away from her parents and put into a home could continue to have such faith in God and her religious views. Especially when her parents were both put into concentration camps and she had little likeley hood of ever seeing them alive again. I especially liked the honesty and the way she expressed her feelings, even after meeting her parents agian. It is a book that stimulates faith and helps a person to see that even under such a terrible dictatorship how even young people can stand firm for their faith and how Jehovah God supports them.
Book Description
By the late 1930s, Europe sat on the brink of a world war. As the holocaust approached, many Jewish families in Germany fled to one of the only open port available to them: Shanghai. Once called "the armpit of the world," Shanghai ultimately served as the last resort for tens of thousands of Jews desperate to escape Hitler's "Final Solution." Against this backdrop, 11-year-old Ursula Bacon and her family made the difficult 8,000-mile voyage to Shanghai, with its promise of safety. But instead of a storybook China, they found overcrowded streets teeming with peddlers, beggars, opium dens, and prostitutes. Amid these abysmal conditions, Ursula learned of her own resourcefulness and found within herself the fierce determination to survive.
Customer Reviews:
Spellbinding Memoir.......2005-11-04
I loved reading this memoir. It was an easy read that was character driven and suspenseful. The language was not unnecessarily pretentious, and getting into the story was easy. Further, I knew nothing before reading this book about the European Jews who found a haven of sorts in Shanghai during WWII. While they suffered many indignities, shortages of food, medicine, shelter, and clothing, they were much better off than the European Jews who went to their deaths in the camps. Ironically, they also fared better than non-Jewish citizens of countries allied against Hitler and Japan during the Japanese occupation. Non Jewish civilians of the allied countries or captured POWS participated in tragedies like the Bataan death march. They were interred in Japanese prison camps and subjected to grueling forced labor. There they starved, froze, and died of injury and disease probably in greater number than the Shanghai Jews. The Shanghai Jews were subjected to some but not a great deal of forced labor. They were required to police their own ghetto and dig the occassional ditch. Jews did die because of a lack of medicine, sanitation and adequate nutrition. However, many Chinese civilians suffered the same losses even before the war. Still this does not excuse the ghettoization of the Jews into terribly crowded conditions, rules that precluded most of them from earning a living even though they had skills or precluded them from owning property. Luckily aid from Jews in the U.S., Canada, Australia and South Africa could reach them. For some this was their only means of support and they lived wretched lives. However, the narrator and her family arrived a little better off than most, and her father was a well liked industrious and optimistic businessman. Her mother took in mending and used her excellent seamstress skills to earn money. She tolerated her reduced circumstances without complaint and focused on the sunnier future she was sure would follow the war's end. When the author's father could not work much after the Japanese occupation, their circumstances were reduced. Because the ghetto was seriously overcrowded most occupants could afford little more space than 100 sq. ft. for every three people. Sanitation was completely lacking, and the description of the "honeypots" was truly odoriferous. Imagine several people suffering from amebic dysyntary using the same water closet outfitted with a rustic chamber pot. The author could have let her story fall into the trap of excessive sentimentality, but she did not. For this and her family's optimism I give her Kudos. I gave this four stars instead of five, because I don't think it rises to the literary level of a five star book. Still I highly recommend it. It is a great novel to take on an airplane, a vacation, or to read on an inclement afternoon. It can be read in a few hours.
MAKE A MIRACLE--You Can Do It!!!!!!!!!!.......2005-07-20
Several months ago I saw the author, Ursula Bacon, on BookTv (C-Span 2). I was very impressed with her; her lecture was excellent; and the true story of her life from the age of 10 to 18 was compelling. So, I immediately ordered her book. But the book sat on my desk for weeks making me feel guilty about not reading it. I too am a writer. So, finally after completing one book and revising another one, I took a break. And what a break that was--when I was transported to the CHINA of 1938-1946! Ms. Bacon, an only child of a Jewish family, left Germany with her parents as Hitler and his cohorts were rounding up Jews and transporting them to Death Camps.
By the time Vati, Dad, and Mutti, Mom, were looking for countries to immigrate to, every country had closed its doors to German Jews except Shanghai, China. And Shanghai was a total mess, worse than anything most Americans would ever see. But Ursula's family lived in the filthy disease-ridden slums and survived by bartering their few possessions for food. Ursula, up until then a very sheltered child, attended a Catholic school where most classes were taught in French. And most of the time she remained optimistic, made many European and Chinese friends of all ages, learned to speak Mandarin Chinese, encouraged her Mutti, and helped Vati with his business endeavors.
Ursula became an adult before becoming a teen! And she encountered many bizarre situations which she handled better than most adults. The worst was when she was 12 or 13 and killed a drunken Japanese soldier with her bare hands when he attacked her as she walked home from a friend's house late at night. She didn't tell her parents, though, because she didn't want to burden them with additional worries.
This intriguing and inspiring survival tale is about Jewish refuges in China during WW II, though it depicts the color of Shanghai and the many nationalities struggling to survive their wartorn world. I didn't want SHANGHAI DIARY to end! However, I couldn't wait to finish it, so I could pass it on to an friend whose daughter adopted the most delightful Chinese girl who I predict will someday be an important leader in some capacity.
The world has grown so small today that every American should go out of his or her way to become acquainted with other cultures and religions. And every American teenager should be given the opportunity to live in a foreign country to learn new languages and cultures. I give this wonderful book MORE than FIVE STARS! And I hope parents will share it with their teens and high school teachers will use it in their classes. Thanks, Ursula! K.J. McWilliams, book reviewer as well as author of Pirates, The Journal of Leroy Jeremiah Jones, a Fugitive Slave, The Diary of a Slave Girl, Ruby Jo, and The Journal of Darien Dexter Duff, an Emancipated Slave, winner of the Young Adult Fiction 2003 Royal Palm Literary Award.
interesting insight and perspective.......2005-07-07
I have enjoyed this book (only read half so far). I don't know how she might remember such detailed accounts, but she did have a diary. This is an amazing account during a terrible time. Worth reading.
Learn how most Chinese lived - Jewish girl in scheisse.......2005-06-04
This is not the best of wartime stories, but the author, an older Jewish lady now residing in Colorado, certainly has a good memory for the details of life in pre-Communist Shanghai. Her family fled with nothing, having entrusted jewelry to an old family friend, so they arrive in Shanghai with a precious few coins to survive. There are wealthy Jews in Shanghai who provide a very minimum bit of hospice space to sleep and some basic slop to eat, as supplies are stretched with the ever-increasing arrivals from all over Europe.
Those who like the dirty details of real life in a poor, overcrowded and ancient civilization will love this book. The author does not mince words at her horror of Chinese sanitation, more actually, the lack thereof. The paragraghs devoted to the honeybuckets, their cleaning, and the stenches of the alleyways could make even a reader vomit. I myself had toured China on the cheap in 1990 and can testify that things had changed little when one got off the main roads of Shanghai - though in the last 15 years, many of the old slums have been torn down to make way for skyscrapers and apartment silos. Going to the bathroom, usually squat Turkish style, was always a nightmare, and always to be postponed until perhaps a Western hotel could be found. Very easy otherwise to lose one's lunch! Oh well, if China was cheap, who cares about a lost lunch?
Not for the young Ursula is China cheap. The father, once a well-off printer and company owner, is now working as a pseudo-wallpaper applier, or rather, with A Chinese Partner, supervising 60 coolies to do the work. The mother has a way with needle and thread, some basic dressmaking, and begins to help other refugees with mending and adjustments. Ursula has learned English in school and from the streets, so she is also employed, as the teenager governess to three high-ranking concubines of a Chinese general. She learns all about the Chinese view of sex, marriage, views of women, and why baby girls are found dumped in the local trashbins all around her Hongkew slum. One days she even found a live, crying girl in the trash, and against all better judgment, fished it out from under the garbage and brought it to a Christian orphanage.
The luck of the refugees go up and down according to the politics and their own individual initiatives. After selling off whatever they managed to smuggle out from Europe (jewelry, winter garments, shoes, books, etc), they must become resourceful in order to eat regularly. All follow with interest whatever bits of news they can garner about the war in Europe, since it quickly moves to their corner of the world.
Then the Japanese arrive and take over Shanghai, with new rules.
Whereas before the Jews could, as foreigners, move freely through Shanghai and conduct business, rent properties, and so on, they are now rounded up and forced to live in one section only of the city, namely, the filthy slum of Hongkew. Families live all in one room, with a sheet hung between to share the room with yet another family "next door". There is no privacy, and Ursula suffers from this. They no longer can manage to do their business freely and become desperate scroungers and scavengers, as indeed are practically all the local Chinese under Japanese rule. A few Jewesses choose to make themselves useful to the Japanese rulers, to get money and presents, but they are despised by their own community.
The last years of the war are spent in this filthy condition, with neighbors and friends dying of the communicable diseases, despair, malnutrition, and random shootings and bombings. Ursula, for example, learned jujitsu, to protect herself against assault by Japanese soldiers. The girls and women learn to never go out alone, and never by night. One evening Ursula makes the mistake to walk back home alone (prescribed routes only for foreigners, by the way), and gets assaulted by a horny soldier. She aims a strong h andchop at his Adam's apple and kills him.
No one the next day commented on one more dead body in the lane, nor asked who could have done it.
My main complaint with Ursula's story is its ending. She and the other refugees dream constantly of USA, with such details as tennis courts, horseback riding and swimming pools, etc. These ideas came presumably from movies, widely shown in Shanghai. Meanwhile, although they're realists, they don't seem to realize that the bulk of the US population in the 1930's was in serious economic stress, with no such lifestyle possible. Even today, not everyone is a spoiled surburbanite by a long shot, especially new arrivals with no money, as they would be.
The fast Happy End, where they all somehow get to America, do well, get married and whatnot, with no struggle implied, is quite a letdown. HEre we have been dragged through the coals of the misery of Chinese life, in its minute details, and suddenly, presto! They somehow get allowed into their dream country (which strings did they pull, how much did it cost, etc.? why the sudden silence on how hard life maneuvers can be?) and do well. Oh? WHat did she study, what work did she find? She mentioned that her father found work with the Denver Post as a printer. Did he know English? Was it hard for him?
What did his wife do?
The main "thrill" of the book is in the details of everyday Chinese life, with its stench, its sexism, its obsessions and superstitions. These come through more clearly for a Western reader than if written by a Chinese, who takes such privations as normal. Indeed, they were, and still are, standard problems for the bulk of China and much of the Third World.
Ursula Bacon's family did not considered themselves Jews in any true religious sense, so their experience is not particularly Jewish, but German. Their German ideas and attitudes come through clearly, especially in their horror of dirt, in their love of literature and knowledge. They are open to all religions and put Ursula, in fact, in a French Catholic school, where she admires the true-believing nuns.
A great read! Just unsatisfactory ending, as if she were trying to wrap it up quickly... so maybe there's a second book coming out of this, the struggle to get a foothold in America, and their shock and horror at some of US customs, disregard for education, plenty of Jew hatred, and so on?
Apparently, also, a movie is coming out on this. Watch for it.
Ursula's Amazing Story.......2005-02-19
"If you can't change it, don't complain." Life is not about events, but it is about people. Life was truly a challenge. To escape Hitler the author and her family escaped to Shanghai, China. She learned to live one day at a time. She had a spirit of dreaming of America. America was a beacon of hope for her during this trying time. After the war she and her parents came to America after a two year struggle to get a visa and they located in Denver.
The author grew up in China as an escapee from Hitler's Germany. In China she learned to be grateful for everything. She had escaped to China as a child of ten. There with her parents she lived with 20,000 other refugees in horrific conditions. But she and her parents survived. The story is told with wonderful courage, sensitivity and even some humor. The author has learned not to hate but to love people, inspite of the hell she suffered caused by Nazi Germany. According to the author the most important emotions to have are love and gratitude. She lives her life with love of people and gratitude for all persons who have helped her during those difficult years.
For those who are interested, there is an author event available on C-Span2 Book TV for this book.
Average customer rating:
- Insightful and uplifting
- Nonfiction bogged down by fiction
- Lost Names
- Korean pride triumphs
- No blame, just poetry
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Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood
Richard E. Kim
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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ASIN: 0520214242 |
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From 1932 to 1945, the Japanese occupied Korea. Organized in seven vivid scenes, Kim's fictionalized memoir tells the story of one family's experience, as told by the boy. The narrative starts in 1933 with a dramatic iced-river crossing into Manchuria, when the boy was just a year old, a story the boy knows from the many times his mother has told him the tale. Next scene and we're in 1938. The boy and his family have moved back to Korea, where the boy is the new boy in school and is learning new routines like bowing his head toward where the Japanese emperor is supposed to be in Tokyo. He does as he is told, but wonders if the emperor knows the children are bowing to him, wonders if he's asleep, or eating breakfast--or maybe even in the toilet. He pictures someone knocking on the door, saying, "Your Majesty! The children, the children! They are bowing to Your Majesty!" and him saying, "Wait a minute! I have my pants down!"
A few years later, the children are told they need new names--the Koreans must renounce their family names and take Japanese ones instead. Later, his father takes him to the cemetery to ask forgiveness from their ancestors for the humiliation of losing their names. The scenes continue as the boy grows up, mingling the experiences of childhood with the history of the occupation, seen in the small day-to-day moments that bring history alive. Richard Kim uses a simple but powerful voice to evoke painful times, a loving family, and a strong spirit of survival. Lost Names is a beautifully written tribute to the people of Korea that is subtle, moving, and hard to put down.
Book Description
In this classic tale, Richard Kim paints seven vivid scenes from a boyhood and early adolescence in Korea at the height of the Japanese occupation, 1932 to 1945. Taking its title from the grim fact that the occupiers forced the Koreans to renounce their own names and adopt Japanese names instead, the book follows one Korean family through the Japanese occupation to the surrender of the Japanese empire. Lost Names is at once a loving memory of family and a vivid portrayal of life in a time of anguish.
Customer Reviews:
Insightful and uplifting.......2007-10-10
While reading this book I got the impression that it was a memoir. It is actally not so please be aware of this when reading. Considering that it is fiction the author was surprisingly "tame" in telling the story. I was expecting another depressing memoir of a family destroyed by the Japanese occupation. In Kim's book, however, the family's suffering is more subtle and their eventual triump refreshing. It's nice to not read a book where everyone and their mothers die a painful death. This book gave a lot of insight into the lives of Koreans during the occupation. It was also nice to know that not all of the imperial Japanese soldiers were as gruesome as they were in the Rape of Nanjing.
Nonfiction bogged down by fiction.......2007-06-15
The "scenes from a Korean boyhood" in this book, which are evidently based on actual events, are very compelling and convey powerfully what life was like under the Japanese occupation of Korea. So that's the reason to read this book. Unfortunately, these scenes are set in a kind of fiction jello that connects one episode with another by means of impressionistic accounts of the Korean landscape and so on. This sort of writing is much less successful, and you'll find your eyes sliding past some of it. Kim is not as skillful at blending fiction and nonfiction as, say, Dave Eggers, and one wishes the author had related more about the father, who had been imprisoned by the Japanese, or the grandparents, or even the village, which was located in what is now North Korea. However, that would be a different book. Lost Names is not difficult reading and is certainly a good place to begin learning about what Koreans endured during World War II.
Lost Names.......2007-04-05
Imperialism is something that is often associated exclusively with the West. The histories of the British colonization of India and the Spanish colonies of Latin America abound, but many fail to notice the history of the Empire of Japan, which held Eastern Asia prior to and during the Second World War. Richard Kim writes about his childhood experience in Korea from 1932 to 1945 in his book Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood and focuses on the situation of Japanese imperialism on the Korean peninsula, and the effects of the colonization.
Richard sees first hand how Japan influence on Korea is affecting his family life, school, and friendships. The book begins with an image of Kim's family leaving Korea for a job and being stopped by the Japanese Imperial Army. This was the first of the scenes that were told through the eyes of Richard Kim. The book goes on to depict six more stories, separated by chapters.
Japan is painted as an outside influence, which is taking over Korea in a more passive way. The narrator describes the Japanese as not bad people, but people who are distinct from the native Koreans, and collectively more powerful and all-surrendering when it comes to their Emperor. This is shown when the narrator talks about how the books gets it's name, in which the Koreans are made to give up their Korean names in exchange for a Japanese name. Showing the strong nature of his family the name chosen by his father means "Foundation of Rock."
Throughout the book, Koreans are portrayed as being in control in Korea behind the thick wall of Japanese occupation. This is largely personified in the character of Kim's college-educated father, whose firm anti-Japanese standpoints are looked-up-to by much of the local community. In spite of this, many Koreans are portrayed to be people who are indebted to the Japanese - shown by the character of Kim's teacher.
Aside from the educated people, Koreans are portrayed as being unaware of the events around the world at the time, shown by the narrator's mother's obliviousness to the unfolding of German invasions in Europe and Japanese occupations in China. These chapters's focus on day-to-day event, which make it very important to the overall understanding the reader, gets of the depth of the effects of the Japanese colonization.
Overall this book was very informative, one is able to see the true impact of the Japanese during World War II. However, not every event depicted in the story is completely true is still shows a first hand perspective in a new way, through a child eye. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in history or the impact of war. Just keep in mind this is not completely factual, but it will give you a better understanding of Korean history.
Korean pride triumphs.......2005-09-21
This was probably my favorite of the books we read in the Japanese History course I took my senior year of college. Young Richard Kim spent the majority of his childhood in his native Korea while it was under occupation by the Japanese, who were not very nice to or tolerant of his people, no matter they were the majority and the occupying Japanese were the minority. There are many hardships and much prejudice he faces growing up, from neighbors, the government, teachers, and schoolmates, but he never loses his sense of pride and Korean nationalism, constantly being reminded by his parents (who are ministers) and his grandmother to remain aware of where he comes from, his identity, the sustained hope that the Japanese won't always be in Korea, and to do well in school and set a fine example to the Japanese, since he mustn't let those Japanese boys at school think they're better than he is. When WWII comes along, everyone suffers the normal wartime deprivations, such as food shortages and bombing raids, but it is especially hard for the Koreans in the midst. Young Richard is forced, along with his classmates, to bow in the direction of the Emperor each morning, recite an ode of allegiance to the Emperor and Japanese government, and, worst of all, to even change his family name. All Koreans are forced to change their surnames to Japanese surnames, although Richard's father is clever and changes their family's name to one with the root meaning "rock," which of course is a reference to Saint Peter and the family's religious faith, a reference the Japanese won't get. It's enough to take away and try to usurp one's culture, traditions, customs, language, and way of life, but when you take away someone's name, that is in a way the ultimate erasure of their identity. Even when forced to, at least on the surface, speak a foreign language, submit to foreign leaders, and follow alien customs, there's still the comfort of knowing your base identity, your name, is still the same, but taking it away makes this prejudice and attempted usurpation of Korean culture incredibly personal and insulting.
It didn't really bother me that some of these memories and thoughts are very complex and detailed for a child as young as Richard is in the beginning. Many times memories of traumatic defining events are stronger and more vivid and real precisely because they were so awful and traumatic, leaving more impact than something as mundane as, say, eating breakfast or walking the dog. And even if some gaps in Richard's memory may have been filled in by what he imagines happened or what his family have told him happened, it doesn't lessen the emotional impact of these events in the slightest. And I like how it was told in the present tense; since discovering quite some time ago that books can be written in the present tense and there's no rule written in stone saying you must only and always write in the past tense, I've much preferred books written in the present tense. It makes the events seem more real and gripping, full of suspense and tension, like constantly wondering what's going to happen next, living right in the moment.
No blame, just poetry.......2005-08-28
A beautifully written book that places you in Korea during the second world war. Fast reading, and well paced told from the POV of a very (maybe too!) wise young boy. Only thing that got me down was knowing that it ended just before the next war again wreaked such damage and havoc, and there was no post script. Definitely worth reading.
Book Description
In this lively and accessible book, Colin Heywood explores the changing experiences and perceptions of childhood from the early Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century. Heywood examines the different ways in which people have thought about childhood as a stage of life, the relationships of children with their families and peers, and the experiences of young people at work, in school and at the hands of various welfare institutions. The aim is to place the history of children and childhood firmly in its social and cultural context, without losing sight of the many individual experiences that have come down to us in diaries, autobiographies and oral testimonies. Heywood argues that there is a cruel paradox at the heart of childhood in the past. On the one hand, material conditions for children have generally improved in the West, however belatedly and unevenly, and they are now more valued than in the past. On the other hand, the business of preparing for adulthood has become more complicated in urban and industrial societies, as the young face a bewildering array of choices and expectations. A History of Childhood will be an essential introduction to the subject for students of history, the social sciences and cultural studies.
Book Description
In the tradition of John McPhee and Kathleen Norris, a wry, moving memoir about a family farm, a father, and a daughter, and why it's so hard to go home again
Debra Marquart grew up on a family farm in rural North Dakota-on land her family had worked for generations. From the earliest age she knew she wanted out; surely life had more to offer than this unyielding daily grind, she thought. But she was never able to abandon it completely.
In this distinctive, beautifully written memoir, she chronicles this process of flight and return-not only from and to a particular landscape, but to respect and admiration for her father. Complex, lyrical, utterly unsentimental, often funny, Marquart's singular voice offers a deeply intelligent rumination on the meaning of native ground, on freedom and security, and on the forging of identity. It brings to mind the very best of those who have written about the natural world and a sense of place-John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, and Kathleen Norris among them.
Customer Reviews:
Searing and funny memoir of coming of age in North Dakota........2007-05-31
Funny and bittersweet, this memoir captures the difficult relations between children and parents and will resonate with many American young women who took a path their parents didn't anticipate and struggle for recognition both at home and in the equally tough wider world of adulthood. Debra Marquart's a fine, fine writer--one to watch.
This book touched my heart!.......2007-01-10
Wow! Debra Marquart very accurately portrayed the essence of growing up "wild" in North Dakota in the 70's. She touched my heart and validated my experiences and memories of that time, too. I want more, more, more!
The farmers daughter.......2007-01-08
Is the name of a dress shop in our town. There are somethings that I know little about so I read this book. I did not learn much. Dakota weather is changing even if we don't realize it. Marquart must want to have her book read and I wanted to read it. I spose I always wanted to be blond and fresh faced from a square state but somehow this book did not reveal much Dakota truth for me. I did grow up wild and whoever chose that title might have been trying a little to hard to captivate readers.
Farm Girl Agrees: This Book is AMAZING!.......2006-12-08
As someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere I can attest to the fact that Debra Marquart's writing is spot on. She describes a very specific subculture of the U.S. (i.e., the upper Midwest) with humor, grace and uncanny truth. She gives voice to a kind of life that is rarely spoken of by those who have endured it. Her insights made me alternately crumple on the floor in tears and laugh out loud shouting "Yes!" Simply put, she gets it right. To top that, she's done her research, too; she mixes lots of interesting background information with excellent storytelling. I am giving this to all my exiled Midwestern friends for Christmas!
Dazzling Memoir.......2006-11-10
This is the most engaging book I've read in several years. Written with all the power that could be expected of an Iowa Writers Program Professor, it tells it's own story while exposing the desperate truths of all who've violently wrenched themselves out of home ground to find a life that fit. Blunt, funny, ironic and wry, its bravely openhearted look at a younger self made me look clearly at my own 20-year-old self, that I've disowned for over 35 years, and invite her back in.
Average customer rating:
- A very important book
- A Splendid, thought-provoking book!
- Another false perpetuation
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First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy
Rosetta Loy
Manufacturer: Metropolitan Books
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ASIN: 0805062580 |
Amazon.com
In this understated yet scathing memoir, novelist Rosetta Loy intersperses scenes from her affluent childhood with a broader portrait of anti-Semitism in fascist Italy. The otherwise effective translation has softened Loy's original title (in Italian, "The Word Jew") but not her blistering depiction of the Church's complicity in Mussolini's persecution of Jews. Pope Pius XI, an outspoken opponent of state anti-Semitism, died in early 1939. His successor, Eugenio Pacelli, had been a papal nuncio in Germany for 12 years, where he signed the 1933 concordat that urged German Catholics to obey the Nazis (events analyzed at length in John Cornwell's excellent 1999 biography, Hitler's Pope). As Pius XII, Pacelli said little and did nothing to prevent racist genocide. Born in 1931, Loy was just a girl during this dreadful period, but she does not excuse herself or her family for going about their daily lives while their Jewish neighbors were subjected to increasingly restrictive laws and then, in late 1943, transported to the German death camps. The author also relates stirring acts of moral heroism--Catholic priests who denounced anti-Semitism as un-Christian, individuals who sheltered Jews--but her quietly uncompromising book suggests that her parents, good people who found fascism personally distasteful but felt helpless to defy it, were more typical. --Wendy Smith
Book Description
An internationally acclaimed novelist and journalist movingly chronicles her childhood in Rome during World War II, providing a rare account by a Catholic of Jewish persecution and Papal responsibility
In 1937, Rosetta Loy was a privileged five-year-old growing up in the heart of the well-to-do Catholic intelligentsia of Rome. But her childhood world of velvet and lace, airy apartments, indulgent nannies, and summers in the mountains was also the world of Mussolini's fascist regime and the increasing oppression of Italian Jews. Loy interweaves the two Italys of her early years, shifting with powerful effect from a lyrical evocation of the many comforts of her class to the accumulation of laws stipulating where Jews were forbidden to travel and what they were not allowed to buy, eat, wear, and read. She reveals the willful ignorance of her own family as one by one their neighbors disappeared, and indicts journalists and intellectuals for their blindness and passivity. And with hard-won clarity, she presents a dispassionate record of the role of the Vatican and the Catholic leadership in the devastation of Italy's Jews.
Written in crystalline prose, First Words offers an uncommon perspective on the Holocaust. In the process, Loy reveals one writer's struggle to reconcile her memories of a happy childhood with her adult knowledge that, hidden from her young eyes, one of the world's most horrifying tragedies was unfolding.
Customer Reviews:
A very important book.......2004-01-04
Rosetta Loy opens this book with her first memories of childhood as a young girl in Rome in the early 30s. She then paints the picture from that time to 1943.
This book actually tells two stories - first the account of Rosetta's life during that period of time and second the historical facts of the time.
The entire book impressed me, but two things about this book absolutely AMAZED me.
1. Roessetta Loy's voice. On the first page she is a young girl tended by a nanny, the reader is treated with the perspective of life at this point in time from the unusual view of a curious and intelligent child. As the book progresses and Rossetta ages the story changes in vocabulary and scope.
2. Ms. Loy presents the key points of political and legal changes in her church, city and country with simply clarity. This is the first book that I have read on the subject that didn't attempt go overboard on explanations, excuses or "what ifs". Ms. Loy states the facts of legal changes and racial politics of Italy at the time without attempting to question `how', `why', `to what end' and `what if'. Instead the reader will hear these questions echo in their own mind.
This is a powerful book. It is written in simple style and easy to read. It could be read in a day or two, but if you are like me when you get to the end you will want to read it again.
A Splendid, thought-provoking book!.......2000-08-18
I could not disagree more with the previous "book critic". This book is not a lambasting of individual Catholics or of the many individual priests that helped to save many Jews. One need only look at Ms. Loy's characterization of Pope Pius XI and his very anti-semetic stance to see that this book in no way sees all Catholics as heartless beasts. What it does show is that with the on-slot of Pope Pius XII's reign, the organized Catholic body-politic did nothing privately or publicly to condemn the atrocities committed against Jews at home or abroad in Nazi Germany. There were over 1200 Jews in Rome alone that could have been "hidden" in the Vatican...but no, the response to that was that Pope Pius XII could have been arrested. Getting arrested seems very tame to Jesus being crucified, does it not? All I can say is that, along with the reading of this very touching book by Ms. Loy, I would also recommend everyone out there supplimenting the reading of this book with Mr. Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope".
Another false perpetuation.......2000-08-06
The media seems to be eating up every book that blasts the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII...here's another attempt to cover up the heroics of the Church during the Nazi era....
Amazon.com
Binjamin Wilkomirski (the name the author believes to be his, though he will never know for sure) was held in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland as a young child. Fragments contains the powerful remnants of his memory, the piercing shards of a child's recollections of unadulterated terror and the confusing horror of the camps. The sheer power of the author's story would be sufficient to explain the force of his words; his steady confidence in his childlike voice and memory adds even greater authority to this memoir. Capable of standing up against Elie Wiesel's harrowing masterpiece Night, Fragments evokes an awesome power through the memory of a child and the words of a courageously honest man who has refused to substitute "understanding" for the inexplicable events he experienced.
Book Description
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award
An extraordinary memoir of a small boy who spent his childhood in the Nazi death camps. Binjamin Wilkomirski was a child when the round-ups of Jews in Latvia began. His father was killed in front of him, he was separated from his family, and, perhaps three or four years old, he found himself in Majdanek death camp, surrounded by strangers. In piercingly simple scenes Wilkomirski gives us the "fragments" of his recollections, so that we too become small again and see this bewildering, horrifying world at child's eye-height. No adult interpretations intervene. From inside the mind of a little boy we too experience love and loss, terror and friendship, and the final arduous return to the "real" world. Beautifully written, with an indelible impact that makes this a book that is not read but experienced,
Fragments is "a masterpiece" (Kirkus Reviews). Translated form the German by Carol Brown Janeway.
"This sunning and austerely written work is so profoundly moving, so morally important, and so free from literary artifice of any kind at all that I wonder if I even have the right to try to offer praise."--Jonathan Kozol, The Nation
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Customer Reviews:
Talk about "false memories"..........2006-04-04
After some investigative reporting by the media, it was discovered that this alleged "true story" of a Holocaust survivor was anything but. The facts? Binjamin Wilkomirski is actually Swiss-born Bruno Grosjean Doessekker, and his experience was about as real as that of the supposed "fellow survivor" who corroborated his story, Laura Grabowski.
How did Grabowski play an indirect role in unmasking the author? She claimed to be an orphan who suffered torture at the hands of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele and was later adopted by an American couple, only to have these stories be exposed as equally untrue (her childhood photos show a happy, healthy American girl w/not even hints of the emaciated sate commonly associated w/those who spent time in concentration camps). Additionally, she was revealed to actually be Lauren Stratford, author of the equally fictitious-but-presented-as-a-true-story "Satan's Underground", which detailed her alleged involvement in Satanism and the sexual abuse she endured from the time she was a young girl (something she'd also had a history of lying about since her late teens); as it turns out, "Grabowski" was actually the surname of her maternal grandparents.
Don't the Wilkomirskis and Grabowskis of this world realize that their exploitation of one of the most despicable events in history is not only self-indulgent and unbelievably selfish, but giving credibility to those misguided Holocaust-denying racist groups? Such lies will allow these scumbags to convince the lesser-informed folk out there that the attempted extermination of an entire race was also nothing but lies, which I'm sure never occured to these self-indulgent storytellers as they proceeded to betray countless REAL survivors, who have already suffered enough as it is.
If Lippy likes it, you know it's garbage.......2006-01-24
Just follow the money trail, the political bantering and incessant self-victimization (which always seems to lead into getting paid one way or another) and you'll see why the most powerful of the jewish lobby (yeah, I'm not afraid to say it) will still ENDORSE IT after it has been proven to be a complete fabrication.
And they wonder why the "extremists" have so much credibility even before people look at all the facts. I've read this book and got a great laugh out of the rediculous claims, and the writings of a man obviously an older version of someone whom would be on the Jerry Springer show today if faced with a different self-victimization issue.
I was already well informed this book was a fabrication in advance, so I can't say "I'm smarter than you all whom were fooled"...heck, even Elie "Weasel" fooled me the first two times around. Looks like his credibility is crap as well. I'mglad I have relatives that were on both sides of WW2; as camp munitions auditor, fitness/activity trainer (A Sergeant's job! He was denied citizenship in US but later came from Canada in about '80), a Luftwaffe infantryman whom both stayed at the conc camps, and himself taken POW when wounded in Belgium (yes many Luft Inf exist so stop emailing me, you don't know history) and a US liberator of Buchenwald...I'm glad REALITY doesnt match the whining stories of crybaby rich jews exiled after the war...so many millions of survivors all rubber-stamping eachothers stories about human soap and lampshades, all proven false by MAINSTREAM science. Like I said, follow the money trail...
Zero stars.......2005-01-15
When I read this book several years ago, I did not understand how anyone could have believed it. Having known several true Holocaust survivors, and heard their stories, I certainly didn't.
Now, there have now been several clear and thorough exposes of the fraud perpetrated by Bruno Grosjean Dossekker, who falsely claimed here to be one Binjamin Wilkomirski, a child survivor of the Holocaust. Stefan Maechler, The New Yorker, 60 Minutes and several other publications prove beyond any doubt that Wilkomirski is no such person and that Fragments is a fiction.
Every possible lead has now been followed; each detail in Dossekker's narration of "events" has been compared with historical records from such leading Holocaust scholars as Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer, accounts of other child survivors, interviews with members of the Dossekker and Grosjean families and more.
The strongest evidence, unearthed by Stephan Maechler, is the fact that in 1981, Dossekker/Wilkomirski contested the will of Yvonne Grosjean, whom, in a letter to officials in Bern Switzerland, he called "my birth mother." Dossekker/Wilkomirski received a third of her estate.
Other evidence includes Dossekker/Wilkomirski's use of Laura Grabowski to "corroborate" his story. Grabowski claims to have known him in a children's home in Krakow. In fact, Grabowski is an American citizen of Christian faith who has since her youth fabricated stories about her victimhood, the most well-publicized being a book called Satan's Underground.
The Social Security number of said Lauren Stratford is the same as that of Grabowski, who subsequently used it to make a false survivor's claim. Furthermore, Satan's Underground and this volume contain startling similarities.
--Alyssa A. Lappen
Memories of a Wartime Childhood.......2003-04-24
It is in Fragments now, a total hoax.
A Holocaust survivor memoir that has received prestigious literary awards and lavish praise has been exposed as a hoax.
In Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, Binjamin Wilkomirski describes his ordeal as an infant in the Jewish ghetto of Riga (Latvia), where his earliest memory is of seeing his father being killed. Wilkomirski also tells how he survived the terrible rigors of wartime internment, at the age of three or four, in the German-run concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz.
First published in German in 1995, Fragments has been translated into twelve languages. In Switzerland, the country where Wilkomirski lives, the book has been a major best-seller. Two documentary films and numerous personal appearances by the author in schools throughout the country have helped promote the memoir.
The American edition was published by Schocken, an imprint of Random House, which heavily promoted the book with teachers' study guides and other supplementary materials.
Jewish groups and major American newspapers have warmly praised Fragments. The New York Times called it "stunning," and the Los Angeles Times lauded it as a "classic first-hand account of the Holocaust." It received the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir, while in Britain it was awarded the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize, and in France the Prix Memoire de la Shoah.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC -- a federal government agency -- was so impressed that it sent Wilkomirski on a six-city United States fund-raising tour last fall.
This past summer, though, compelling evidence came to light exposing Wilkomirski's memoir as an literary hoax.
Although he claims to have been born in Latvia in 1939, and to have arrived in Switzerland in 1947 or 1948, Swiss legal records show that he was actually born in Switzerland in February 1941, the son of an unwed woman, Yvette Grosjean. The infant was then adopted and raised by the Doessekkers, a middle-class Zurich couple. Jewish author Daniel Ganzfried, writing in the Swiss weekly Weltwoche, also reports that he has found a 1946 photo of the young Bruno Doessekker (Wilkomirski) in the garden of his adoptive parents.
Comparisons have been drawn between Wilkomirski's Fragments and The Painted Bird, the supposedly autobiographical "Holocaust memoir" by prominent literary figure Jerzy Kosinksi that turned out to be fraudulent.
Reaction by Jewish Holocaust scholars to the new revelations has been instructive, because they seem more concerned about propagandistic impact than about historical truth. Their primary regret seems merely to be that the fraud has been detected, not that it was perpetrated.
In an essay published in a major Canadian newspaper (Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 18, 1998), Jewish writer Judith Shulevitz arrogantly argued that it doesn't really matter much if Fragments is authentic. Her main misgiving, apparently, is that the deceit was not more adroit: "I can't help wishing Wilkomirksi-Doesseker [sic] had been more subtle in his efforts at deception, and produced the magnificent fraud world literature deserves."
Deborah Dwork, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University (Worcester, Mass.), and co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (Yale Univ. Press, 1996), agrees that Fragments now appears to be fraudulent. At the same time, though, she expressed sympathy for Wilkomirski, saying that when she met him he appeared "to be a deeply scarred man." Amazingly, Dwork does not blame him for the imposture, "because she believes in his identity." Instead, she takes the publishers to task for having "exploited" Wilkomirski. (New York Times, Nov. 3, 1998).
Deborah Lipstadt, author of the anti-revisionist polemic Denying the Holocaust, has assigned Fragments in her Emory University class on Holocaust memoirs. When confronted with evidence that it is a fraud, she commented that the new revelations "might complicate matters somewhat, but [the work] is still powerful."
Daniel Ganzfried reports that Jews have complained to him that even if Fragments is a fraud, his exposé is dangerously aiding "those who deny the Holocaust."
American Jewish writer Howard Weiss makes a similar point in an essay published in the Chicago Jewish Star (Oct. 9-29, 1998):
Presenting a fictional account of the Holocaust as factual only provides ammunition to those who already deny that the horrors of Nazism and the death camps ever even happened. If one account is untrue, the deniers' reasoning goes, how can we be sure any survivors accounts are true ... Perhaps no one was ready to question the authenticity of the [Wilkomirski] account because just about anything concerning the Holocaust becomes sacrosanct.
Wilkomirski himself has responded to the new revelations by going into hiding, although he did issue a defiant statement describing the climate of discussion about his memoir as a "poisonous" atmosphere of "totalitarian judgment and criticism."
pass over the scramble to "fix" this into nonexistence.......2002-11-03
read this book before reading the spew about its "authenticity". don't concern yourself with where the pieces go in what you know, they don't belong to your understanding. to frame the story in history, geography, society, is to try and correct the narrative -- for whose benefit? "fragments" captures the essence of "screen memory" like no textbook on the subject possibly could; attempts to convey it by those who've come to terms with it for what it is rarely get past the attempt.
regardless of why the book was written, or how the authour came to possess these images; real, imagined, conjured, who knows, maybe not even the writer, the story of this binjamin doesn't unfold, it simply carries the ground of its own consciousness, in recollections of a childhood unmitigated by whatever closure of comprehension comes in adulthood. memories stored and recalled in items of the senses, intense and unfiltered perceptions with minimal coherent external context in which early cognative development makes distinctions, signifies, aligns, scales -- makes sense and story of memory.
the allegory is there in the book itself, plain as day, at least twice; in the beginning with the "big picture" abstraction in binjamin's persistent nightmare, and near the end, where the abstracted "big picture" manifests in a shared experience of total "incomprehension" of situation. what you know or can surmise is irrelevant, there are only these fragments.
Book Description
Much has been written about World War II, but not often do we hear about the immeasurable suffering of the Germans who wanted no part of Hitler's regime.
Abandoned and Forgotten is the memoir of a young girl growing up in the then-German province of East Prussia by the Baltic Sea. Orphaned at the age of nine and left to fend for herself in a hostile world, Evelyne Tannehill witnessed firsthand what happens when law and order break down and self-preservation becomes the only thing that matters. Her journey is a poignant example of how resilient the human spirit can be, even in the face of war's greatest horrors.
Customer Reviews:
Wonderful read!.......2007-10-02
I bought this book having no idea how engaging it would be. I received the book yesterday afternoon, and today, the next day, I have finished it! I could not put this book down. This is an interesting book on a relatively unknown subject for most people. This is a part of history that many don't want to believe and have tried to sweep under the carpet. I would highly recommend this to anyone!
Captivating and enthralling story .......2007-09-16
This is a captivating story about WWII told by an adult as she lived through it as a nine year old child in East Prussia, Germany. The author gives vivid pictures of the horrors of war on the innocent. It also gives a history of how countries get involved with demonstrating inhumane behavior. You will become totally enthralled and have a hard time putting the book down.
Superb memoir of a childhood in wartime Germany and Poland.......2007-07-21
This is a superb memoir of a child who struggled by herself and against great odds to survive in Germany and Poland during World War II. Written in simple, elegant prose, the author makes us see and feel the ravages of war and their awful impact on the innocent. Too often, those in America--certainly including this reader--have labled all Germans as Nazis in World War II and have failed to comprehend the horrors that were the tragic lot of Tannehill and others like her. She tells her story with such power and conviction that readers think they are at her side as she copes with unimaginable adversity. This is a superb memoir and particularly well-suited for book groups since every reader will want to discuss it with others. It offers a rare window not only on the lives of innocents who struggle in wartime, but also on ourselves.
Amazing Book.......2007-03-24
This amazing book is well written in a quick paced, exceptionally readable style. I found it difficult to put aside. It recounts the true story of a young German girl's survival in the province of East Prussia, Germany, toward the end of WWII. Her tumultuous world involved invasions by hostile peoples, becoming orphaned and serving as an ill-clad, starving slave laborer for a family now living in the very house where she had spent her early, idyllic childhood. Also, it provides insight into how innocent German people became victims of their tyrannical government, and the great suffering of survivors of the horrors of war. I treasure this book, am sharing it with friends, and highly recommend it to any thoughtful reader.
Ruth Dickerson, MD
Compelling story..........2007-03-20
This memoir of growing up in East Prussia during World War 2 engaged me from the beginning through to the epilogue. She did not spare us any of the difficult parts but neither did she dwell on them. The story that emerges is rich in detail but balanced and sometimes funny. In the west we don't often get the perspective of Hitler from the German point of view. I have bought several copies of this book for my friends because I can't bear to loan them my copy.
Average customer rating:
- Poignant memoir
- A tragic story written beautifully
- Wonderful Book Thea!
- A Message of Appreciation From John Halo
- Important part of history
|
Not Even My Name: A True Story
Thea Halo
Manufacturer: Picador
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0312277016 |
Book Description
Not Even My Name is the unforgettable story of Sano Halo's survival of the death march at age ten that annihilated her family-as told to her daughter, Thea-and the poignant mother-daughter pilgrimage to Turkey in search of Sano's home seventy years after her exile. AUTHORBIO: Thea Halo, shown here with her mother, Sano, at age eighty-nine, is a writer and painter who has won awards for her poetry and essays, and has exhibited her paintings in galleries in New York City and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.Sano Halo is a recipient of New York State's Governor's Award for Excellence in honor of Women's History Month, "Celebrating Women of Courage and Vision."
Customer Reviews:
Poignant memoir.......2006-09-26
This poignant memoir written in such astonishing detail is an unforgettable story that will capture the reader from the start. Sano is like a small but sturdy flower growing in the most unlikely and least advantageous of garden spots. In her we see goodness and love survive heart rending loss and the cruel displacement of senseless war. I could not put the book down once I began to read it.
A tragic story written beautifully.......2006-05-28
This is not a book to read if you want to be cheered up, yet I will never forget the story. I wept off and on reading of the author's mother's experience on the death march. I have traveled to Greece and Turkey twice yet had no knowledge of the genocide of the Pontic Greeks. I thank the author for the courage to live through her mother's amazing journey as she told her unforgettable story.
Wonderful Book Thea!.......2005-10-22
I am also of Pontic Greek and Assyrian origin. Even though our lands were taken away, our people still exist, we still maintain our language, and the gospel is still spreading which is a blessing. I am glad to see someone wrote a book on the Greek/Assyrian/Armenian Genocide. The Turks tortured and massacred millions of Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians. I am happy to see you raise more public awareness about this. I pray for the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians still living in Asia Minor that deal with constant persecution for their Christian faith. Great Book Thea!
A Message of Appreciation From John Halo.......2005-10-22
I am John Halo the brother of Thea Halo. I am very proud of my sister for writing such a wonderful book, NOT EVEN MY NAME, that depicts such an accurate account of my mothers life, that discribeds the pain that my wonderful mother endured in her childhood and throughout her life. Thea Halo is a champion and a woman with a beautiful hart and a loving sole that deserves the recognition of a grate author, and I hope someone will relize the value of this true story and make a movie and documentary so to educate our generation and future generation from repeating this horror. I would also like to let everyone know that my mother was so grateful and proud that Thea wrote this book and is also grateful to all of the wonderful people that came to see her speak. And last I would like to say how proud and thankful I am of my sister Thea Halo for being my sister.
Sincerely
John Halo
Important part of history.......2005-07-08
The subject is of great interest and great importance to the present situation in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. It is well written and quite engaging. As it is a book I want to keep permanently in my library, I only wish it were printed on higher quality paper.
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