Out of the Depths, Israel Meir Lau

This is one of those special books that you want to read slowly in order to savour every word and every part of the story.

There is no doubt that Rabbi Israel Meir Lau’s life is in itself miraculous. He was one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald Camp, the descendent of an uninterrupted line of 38 generations of Rabbis and against all odds, he himself became a Rabbi, eventually becoming Chief Rabbi of Israel. A startling story.

What makes this book so special is that Lau has told his story with tenderness and awe, and while there are moments where readers will have to pause in order to recover their composure, as a whole this autobiography tells of the wonderful capacity of the human spirit to survive, of the value of connections with others and the intensity of the faith in the Divine. I was struck by Lau’s commitment to learning and the way that he navigated through so many lonely obstacles because he believed in continuing his father’s legacy. The enormous empathy that he gained as a result of his experiences is clear – especially when he recounts his relationship with the late King Hussein.

There were many stellar moments in this book and I have chosen only one to encompass Lau’s personality and life experiences. Lau gives this speech at French convalescence home where he and his brother, Naphtali, went after Buchenwald was liberated. The event occurs when a group of people come to visit the orphans staying there, and amongst them is an adult survivor who wants to address them. All he manages to say are “only three words in  Yiddish: ‘Kinder, taiyereh kinder …’ (Children, dear children)” before he bursts into tears. Lau’s response to this scene is recorded below:

“If you will allow me, I would like to say a few words on behalf of my friends. We would like to thank you. Not to thank you for coming, because we did not want this visit. Not to thank you for the gifts, because we do not want them. We want to thank you for the greatest gift of all, which we received from you just a few minutes ago, and that is the ability to cry. When they took my father and mother, my eyes were dry. When they beat me mercilessly with their clubs, I bit my lips, but I didn’t cry. I haven’t cried for years, nor have I laughed. We starved, we froze, and bled, but we didn’t cry. For the past few months, before and since the liberation, I have had the feeling that I am not a normal person, nor will I ever be. That I have no heart. That if I can’t cry when I am supposed to, I must have a stone in my chest instead of a human heart. But not any more. Just now I cried freely. And I say to you, that whoever can cry today, can laugh tomorrow, and he is a mensch, a human being. For this I thank you.”

*

While this book has left an indelible impression on me for many reasons, there were several moments where I felt uncomfortable with the way that Lau was seeming to give himself accolades – this was most obvious when he gave an account of his position as Chief Rabbi and all the people he met and things that he did. Compared to the tone and nature of the early Lau, as told in this narrative, this part of the text rang hollow for me …

Nonetheless, I was riveted to the end and my overall feeling is that here is a man worth listening to:

“Moshe Chaim is the first candle in the private Hannukah menorah I have been privileged to create. My wife is the base of that menorah, from which the candles, our eight children, went out into the world and I am the gabbai, whose role is to help those candles that they will spread their light and proclaim, each in a special way, the miracle of the victory of eternal Israel.”

Fantastic Flying Books…

A delightfully inspiring short animation film has reminded me this week about the wonderful awe that a book brings.

Mr Morris Lessmore – loving the name … and yes, sometimes less is more! Especially in a short film. In this visual delight Morris goes on a wonderful adventure which recalls the horrors of Hurricane Katrina, an environmental holocaust and the dispersal of millions of people. He witnesses colour draining from the world and language with it. He is as destitute as the place he literally lands in. And we gather from the film’s opening that our Morris is a wordsmith, a writer, a literature lover. He is clearly devastated by his loss of language and it is here that the flying books save him.

Suddenly, there is colour and sound and vitality, and it is through all of this that Morris re-ignites his passion and finds his voice. His love for these books is enormous and only grows as they are given personalities and voices.

 

I fell in love with books and reading all over again through this film. It is quite simply one of the most brilliant things that I have been privileged to watch.

Thank you to whomever was involved in this creation!

We Are All Made of Glue, Marina Lewycka

I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what attracted me to this book. I recall seeing the book by the same author with the bizarre title about Tractors in Ukrainian and I being so perturbed by the peculiarness of the title that I never bothered to give the book a second glance. I had never read any review about this book nor had I read anything about Lewycka as an author. I had nothing to guide me but the apparent ‘fun’ that this author seeks as implied by those tractors.

So, imagine my surprise and sheer delight when I discovered that this book was filled with the most magnificent characters in a traditional sense. Here were people who seemed real. People with issues, people who struggled with themselves and with the world without needing psychotherapy. People who seemed somehow whole, despite their many holes.

I was gripped from the moment I first encountered Georgie Sinclair vigorously throwing her husband’s precious LPs into the dumpster. I was even more taken by the quirky Mrs Shapiro, a neighbour, who we meet ravaging through the dumpster and delighting over her find. The conflicting values between these two women make them a perfect combination to force readers to reconsider their own connections with people, what manufactures those connections and how they are cemented.

For some very strange reason, Georgie and Mrs Shapiro are bonded, quite like glue in fact. Georgie comes to Mrs Shapiro’s aid in many ways throughout the book, saving her from nursing homes and other nightmares. However, at the same time Mrs Shapiro gives Georgie back the passion that she has lost somewhere along the road that is her life. I loved the way that these two bantered and related, the way they resided both separately and within each other, alongside each other, connected but clearly apart.

Even more than the characters, I loved the plot. The twists and crazy turns were fabulous. There were so many highlights that I can’t name them all and doing so would only spoil the story for those who might choose to read it. Needless to say, this book spoke to me on so many levels and really reignited a joy for reading that is so often lost beneath the mire of more intense and overtly challenging texts.

In this book I read satire and endearment, love and passion, politics and sociology. I read health care and economics, I read deceit and resolve. I read families and loneliness, connections and the wonderful unfolding of furls of tangents which made the characters so multi-dimensional. Watch out for the action with Georgie’s son to understand some of my meaning here!

So, I eat my words. Tractors in Ukrainian sounds, in hindsight, like a magnificent idea… along with Two Caravans and anything else this marvellous author cares to pen.

My Name is Ross, Ross Fitzgerald

Let me open this review by saying that I don’t follow Australian politics, I don’t generally like most Australian literature and I definitely don’t know much about Australian history. The reasons for all of these things are many and complex and this is not the forum to explore my gnawing distaste. But, understanding this does shed some light on why my choice in wanting to read this memoir is so unusual. I am not quite sure what appealed to me … whether it was just the picture on the cover (what an unusual looking gentleman!) or the subtitle: An Alcoholic’s Journey or perhaps the review that I read which indicated the enormous strength of character that was required for this man to write this book. Nonetheless, I was inspired to read this book and overjoyed when I discovered it at the library. Yay for the public library!!

I have not been disappointed. Fitzgerald’s writing is magnificent. I am dumbstruck by what must be his clear brilliance, his stamina and his ability to gain clarity through the darkest mist. Reading this book has been like entering into a complex maze and trying to understand something that simply does not exist. It is hard to explain. At times I feel as though Fitzgerald is writing with clarity and at other times I am confused and confounded by the lack of structure or perhaps his ability to maintain a thought and complete it. I can only think that this must be the nature of his beast.

While his life is clearly fascinating in and of itself – who he meets, what he does and accomplishes – what this book is really about is the significance of Fitzgerald’s journey through addiction. I was particularly taken by the fact that he credits his alcoholism as saving his life – if he hadn’t drunk he would have committed suicide, he says. There is a stark wonder in this revelation and it is a credit to him that he can see the value in the experience.

Fitzgerald’s life is heavy and the stories that he tells in this memoir are mostly depressing and equally weighed down with portent. His moments of joy and light are few and far between and many (if not most) of his central relationships are plagued with tragedy and/or despair. But, reading this book has, in and of itself, not been depressed. Fitzgerald is grateful that he is alive, thankful that he has had all these experiences and indebted, publicly, to so many people. One cannot help but be inspired.

Without doubt a fascinating individual who has made incredible contributions, not just to politics and academia in general, to the people around him too.

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides

There is no doubt that Eugenides is a stellar writing. His prose is captivating, his characters engaging and there is a certain sense of flow to his plot. I thoroughly enjoyed Middlesex, Eugenides’ second book – although others have criticised it for being too much like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children without the fantasy and aura that Rushdie brings to the text. I can certainly see the comparison between the two authors with regard to Middlesex; but in The Marriage Plot, there is no Rushdie to be found. Rather, what I saw here was a mix of Jonathan Franzan’s Freedom and something like Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. In his review in the New York Times, William Deresiewicz calls The Marriage Plot “daylight realism”.

The book features three main characters, all university students, confused, young, perhaps naive or innocent. In some ways each of these characters is a stereotypical representation of a larger social group.

Meet Madeleine Hanna: upper class, White, privileged background, with a deep interest in Victorian literature, she is unsure about the shift that is occurring in literary theory, intrigued by the rise of modernism and its implications in how she reads her favourite authors.

Leonard Bankhead is Madeleine’s boyfriend. He is a peculiar character, brilliant but weighed down by emotional distress and dis-ease. Uncomfortable in his own skin he succumbs to mental illness and it is this that is the driving force of the novel’s plot.

In wonderful contrast to Bankhead’s distress is Mitchell Grammaticus who spends the entire novel yearning passionately for Madeleine, desperate to just soak up the aura of her presence, to bask in her glow, to brush against the air occupying the space around her. Mitchell is by far the most interesting of these characters. He is filled with questions and a deep need to understand how the world operates. He is fascinated by G-d and the workings of religion and devotion and much of the novel is spent following his exploration of divinity and divine ideas.

While I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, discovering the characters and unfurling the plot, I felt that the novel’s ending compromised by enjoyment. I was dissatisfied by what others see as a natural resolution of this type of conflict. I was irritated and disappointed by Mitchell’s revelation and frustrated that Leonard was allowed such an easy exit, to just disappear into the woods without taking responsibility for his life and those who were in it – and don’t get me started about Leonard’s mother!!

Despite what I saw as a let down at the end, I was very entertained by Eugenides’ satirical expose of theory hungry students and academia and the angst of students. Under the biting criticism, what makes this novel so sad is that it seems  terribly real.

Feeling obliged to Hitch a ride …

Tablet magazine has an interesting article on Christopher Hitchens this week.

What I know of Hitchens comes from his association with the late Edward Said, a Palestinian academic who taught at Columbia University and was largely responsible for the development of the theory of Orientalism and wave of support that rose for the Palestinian refugee movement on campuses across the US in the 1970s. Hitchens worked with Said on a book entitled: “Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question”. The title says it all.  In the past I guess I have always put Hitchens together with Chomsky, perhaps because they are both featured in this text or perhaps because their rhetoric seemed so aligned and highly critical of Israel on many fronts.

With Hitchens’ death I have suddenly developed an appetite for finding out more about his life. Irony. Despite the fact that I can no longer hitch a ride with Hitchens’ political philosophies, I am intrigued to read his autobiography – if only because I am quite taken by his Joyce in Bloom article as it appeared in Vanity Fair. Who knew that Hitchens was indeed a great writer?

 

Lily Renee, Escape Artist

I have often wondered how one teaches young children about the events surrounding the Holocaust. There is so much brutality (bestiality as Denis Avey described it) inherent in that era that it seems too enormous to simplify for young ears. Trina Robbins has attempted to do just that, record the story of Lily Renee, a young artist, who survived the war by making it onto a kindertransport. Renee’s story is fascinating and so clearly depicted. She survives the war in England, subjected to harsh conditions in the house of a penpal. Eventually she flees and becomes a nanny and nursemaid in her efforts to earn enough money to eat and live. For a long while she has no news of her parents (although the way the story is told she doesn’t dwell on the possibilities of their fate).

Renee is clearly a survivor, a tenacious  young woman who isn’t afraid to stand up for herself, to make something of herself and to create some light in the darkest of places. At times I thought that this book could have made more of this fact as it is such a valuable lesson for all people to learn.

Eventually, Renee hears that her parents have made it to America. They send for her and she joins them there and goes on to become an artist, successful in her own right.

The book glosses over the tragedies of concentration camps and the horrors of life for Jews in Europe at this time. It is written in comic-strip style, illustrated with minimal text and vivid colour. It is straight forward enough for younger readers to appreciate, yet depth is added by the glossary at the book’s rear which provides more of an insight into the events of the Holocaust. The book is also enhanced by real photographs collected from Renee’s past which bring to life her story.

The one enormously appealing aspect of this book is that it focuses on women. It is a book written by a woman, about a woman and all the women in her life. Renee finds comfort in the arms of a woman on the kindertransport, she is at the mercy of her penpal’s mother who is cruel and abusive, she finds shelter with a female school teacher and then a female nurse. She then goes on to illustrate comics about heroines who fight evil. In this way, Robbins has done a marvellous job of bringing a female face to the war and the Holocaust.

By giving women a voice in this dark time she has managed to write a book that is distinctive and well worth reading.

Ape House, Sara Gruen

I picked up this book on a whim. I was looking for something easy with which to relax after my tumultuous ride with Denis Avey to Auschwitz and back (I am still reeling from that book!). Sara Gruen’s Ape House seemed like just the right sort of medicine.

I had read mixed reviews. Some thoroughly enjoyed this book, while others were dismayed at the wasted potential of the narrative and the triviality of the plot and characters. As a result, I had no expectations about this book and consequently I was quite surprised to find myself quite enjoying the quirky mix of heavy themes with seemingly frivolous action. In part, I agree with Ron Charles‘ criticism in The Washington Post: ”Gruen investigated how apes learn human language and then inexplicably buried her discoveries under a silly thriller about a sad-sack journalist and a naive primate scientist.” However, I am more inclined to side with Jane Smiley who views this book in a gentler light: “Ape House is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.”

I really enjoyed the characters for all their flaws. I found tattooed Celia to be intriguing, I empathised with journalist John Thigpen and I loved the way that Gruen introduced a troop of prostitutes who become the key to catching the bad guys in this story.

I wouldn’t call this ground breaking fiction, but I certainly found it worth reading.

The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz, Denis Avey

I can’t say enough about this book. I don’t even know where to begin or how to find the works to properly convey the magnitude of what is written here and how it is expressed.

I will simply say that this is one of the most important books that I have ever encountered and been privileged enough to read. I have fortunately read widely about the Holocaust and the tragedies of WWII both from an historical and a personal perspective, but, I have never read anything like Avey’s account.

I have visited Yad Vashem and the Washington Holocaust Museum and the Jewish Museum in Sydney and each has been profound and moving and austere. I have read Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and countless others. And I have been stilled by the enormity of what they endured and how they managed to convey the intensity of the horror that they experienced and over which they triumphed. I have done courses about the Holocaust, read poems about the Holocaust, seen photographs depicting the trauma and the chaos and the inhumanity.

I find myself pondering what it is that Avey has done which so distinguishes this book?

I think that the only way to explain how moved I was by this text is to use Avey’s own words, taken from the point of the book where he is explaining how he swapped clothes with a Jewish prisoner and took his place in Auschwitz, giving up the security that his Prisoner of War status afforded him:

“I lay and listened to the wheezing and groaning of the others in the dark. Someone was rambling to himself, endlessly repeating the same locked-in phrases. He was not alone. There were the screams of people reliving by night the terrors of the day, a beating, a hanging, a selection. For others it would be the loss of a wife, a mother, a child on arrival. When they awoke, the nightmares continued around them. For them there was no escape.

When you give up, you don’t even feel pain any more. Every emotion or feeling is cut away. That’s how they were. That’s how it was.

I struggled to breathe again. It was stiflingly hot and there was the putrid smell of ripening bodies. Auschwitz III was like nothing else on earth; it was hell on earth. This is what I had to come to witness but it was a ghastly, terrifying experience.”

“It was days before I was able to reflect on those hours in Auschwitz III and appreciate the utter desperation of the place. It was the worst thing you could do to a man, I realised. Take everything away from him – his possessions, his pride, his self-esteem – and then kill him. Kill him, slowly. Man’s inhumanity to man doesn’t begin to describe it. It was far worse than the horror I faced in the desert war. Then I had an enemy before me and I did my duty. I was good at it and so I survived.”

I think that Avey’s text is so powerful because the impact that the bestiality that he witnessed had on him is so clear in the way he describes things:

“People talk about man’s inhumanity to man, but that wasn’t human or inhuman – it was bestial. Love and hate meant nothing there. It was indifference. I felt degraded by each mindless murder I witnessed and could do nothing about. I was living obscenity.”

This obscenity haunted Avey for over 60 years, tormenting him with nightmares, leaving him bereft of a language which could broach the horrors he had witnessed.

I loved this book. I think that Avey’s message will stay with me for ever: bad things only happen when righteous people do nothing.

Denis Avey, you are a great man and clearly deserving of a place in heaven.

The Book of Lies, Mary Horlock

Textpublishing provides the following outline of this book:

Guernsey, 1985. Fifteen-year-old Catherine Rozier has a secret she can no longer keep to herself. It’s about the night her best friend fell from the cliffs.

Twenty years earlier, Charlie Rozier stands at the edge of the same cliffs, looking for a confession of a different kind. He thinks he was betrayed by his friend during the Occupation, and now he wants the truth to come out.

This stunning debut from Mary Horlock is about the conflicts and trials of growing up, the secrets of families, and the repressed histories that we all harbour. Captivating and moving, it is a journey with two characters whose unique voices the reader will not easily forget.

It sounds captivating. It wasn’t.

I really and truly struggled with this book. I so desperately wanted to like the characters, to be drawn into the plot and to be carried away into another time and place. But, none of this happened. I found the first part of the book terribly boring, slow moving and at times confusing. I felt as though there was something there waiting to be discovered but it was never really revealed. My position as reader in this relationship was frustrating to say the least and I read on to the final page only because of this feeling that buried here was something great.

Despite the challenges that I faced in actually completing this book (read: it took me a REALLY REALLY REALLY LLLLLOOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGG time!), what I found most interesting was the context of Guernsey during WWII. In fact, I was so taken by this background that at times I found myself researching some of the events and descriptions which Horlock provided in outlining the backdrop for part of the story.

When I go back and reread the book’s opening, it doesn’t seem so bad. It actually captures some of the elements which so attracted me to the book in the first place. For a moment I have to consider that perhaps I have missed the book’s essence … but no, I don’t think this is the case. I wasn’t convinced on too many levels – even the title didn’t seem to fit with the angst that this book described. Poor Cat, fat and lumpy she seemed to me, totally out of place, exactly as I imagine Guernsey to be, funnily enough (not that I have anything but assumptions to base that on!). But, rather than empathise with Cat, I found her irritating. She grated on me as I imagine she grated on her peers. And, to top it all off, I found Nicolette’s actions totally over-exaggerated and unrealistic, especially toward the end as Cat tries to recall the events of the night on the cliff. Whether Nic’s behaviour is described in this way as a means to convey Cat’s version of events (a type of justification), I cannot be sure. Nonetheless, there are too many moments in this text where Nic seems excessive in terms of characterisation.

Feel free to read some other reviews here, here and here.

What has stayed with me most from this read is how relieved I am that I finally reached the last page!

(As an aside, I have read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and I found that a far more endearing read.)