Dense and deeply moving.
The quest for a sense of belonging motivates a first-generation Jewish American exploring his roots in post-WWII Austria.
Max Berman emigrates from the Austrian village of H in 1928 when he is almost five. His mother, Mira, who never adjusts to America, keeps alive his memory of the gracious home and European bourgeois lifestyle they left behind. As a young soldier in Europe in 1945, Max briefly visits the house in H now occupied by strangers (the Austrian relatives who lived there all died in the Holocaust). A successful, free-wheeling bachelor, Max puts off visiting H again until Mira’s death. Now 50 years old, he returns to Austria to reclaim the house. After months of legal maneuvers, he gains ownership, then returns to New York since he can’t take occupancy until the rent-control tenants die. While in H, Max becomes involved in the small Jewish community of returned survivors. Their leader, Spitzer, is a private, almost saintly man who accepts the local Austrians’ arrogance and defensiveness. Through Spitzer, Max has met Nadja, a young woman who wants to be Jewish. He brings her to America to be educated. She falls in love with him but he breaks off their affair and she must find her way in America alone. Eighteen years pass before the last tenants in H die. Max, almost 70, returns to renovate the house. He rekindles his friendship with Spitzer and begins to write a chronicle of the Jews of H, an indictment of their mistreatment by Christian Austrians through the centuries. Upon Spitzer’s death, Nadja visits H. Max realizes he does love her—but it’s too late. He returns to New York, where he can be himself without the weight of history. Austrian-born Mitgutsch (Lover, Traitor, 1997) writes with a passionate anger that can be discomforting, but her characters’ complex humanity is riveting.
Dense and deeply moving.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-188-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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