Maus I

 

Maus: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman, 159 pages.

I read Spiegelman's famous graphic novel for the first time recently, and despite hearing plenty about it still found myself described. The comic weaves together his father's experiences during the holocaust with their troubled relationship in the present day, in a way that make both feel eminently personal. Spiegelman doesn't shy away from anyone's flaws, nor does he shy away from the multitude of small, everyday horrors of the holocaust. I'm glad I finally got around to reading this modern classic, and will definitely pick up the second half of the story soon.

The Roma: A Traveling History

The Roma: A Traveling History by Madeline Potter (2025), 222 pgs. 

The Romani people have faced persecution throughout the many lands to which they have traveled, and in which they now live, but their culture and their resilient community members persist. In this book, Romani author Madeline Potter combines personal experience and historical fact to paint a truly beautiful picture of the Roma across time and space. She tells Romani folktales, writes about Romani artists and activists and athletes, and sheds light on a group which has historically been--at best--written off and--at worst actively stereotyped and discriminated against. After being enslaved in Romania, forced to assimilate in France, ignored in the United States, and put through the horrors of the Samudaripen, the Romani Holocaust, the Roma have remained. This history is a beautiful recognition of the pain that has been inflicted and the triumphs that shine through. 

This is a wonderful introduction to Romani history. Madeline Potter does a great job of addressing stereotypes and disputing them with historical fact and context. There is so much about the Roma I did not know, and I really appreciated how accessible this book is in introducing the reader to so much culture. Each chapter encompasses a quick history in a certain country, and despite including so much knowledge, it is a pretty quick read. I highly recommend for those looking to learn more about this marginalized group.

From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes

From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes by Robert Clary (2001) 214 pages

I grew up watching the TV series Hogan's Heroes and my kids enjoyed watching it on DVD decades later. I sometimes wondered whether those who were harmed by the Germans in WWII found the show to be insensitive or inappropriate. Little did I know that Robert Clary (born Robert Max Widerman), who played Louis Lebeau on Hogan's Heroes, was himself a survivor of German camps, from age 16 to 19. I hadn't known much about him other than his role on Hogan's Heroes, and I enjoyed reading about his life, but was especially struck by his time in Paris when the German occupation started, through the deportation of his family, and his regrouping after the war. Later, I was interested in the descriptions of his years working on Hogan's Heroes, as well in later years when he became active in speaking to groups of children about the Holocaust.

The Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe

The Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe by Rebecca Erbelding, 368 pages.

An interesting look at a little-known group of Americans who attempted to overcome the strong antisemitism in the United States government and to do something, anything, to rescue as many of Europe's Jews as possible. While they were able to claim some successes, and the tireless work of John Pehle, Florence Hodel, and Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau did help save a number of people, they were hampered by the antisemitic attitudes of members of the State department and members of the British government (both State and the British seemed to object to any plans). Often they were stymied by the "best way we can save everyone is by winning the war" attitude of the military. And so the War Refugee Board and its agents attempted to get non-combatant and allied governments to agree to take Jewish refugees in. They attempted to get visas and papers to Jews, to bribe Nazi officials, anything to let Jews leave occupied territories. Raoul Wallenberg worked for the WRB, as did a number of other interesting agents, some selfless, and some more on the self-serving side of the spectrum. A fascinating book.

Half-Blood Blues

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, 321 pages.

One of those library and book things that keep happening and that no longer surprise me all that much is that there are great books and great authors that zoom on by you sometimes. I heard the early buzz about Washington Black last year and read it relatively soon after it came out, but somehow I had gotten the idea that this was Edugyan's first novel. Turns out it wasn't. Somehow I had missed the Booker award finalist title from 2011 that was the Canadian author's second novel. So, I read this because I was fond of Washington Black, but I have got to say that I enjoyed this book even more. I think, because I hadn't heard of Half-Blood Blues, that I was expecting it to be not-quite-up-to the level of writing that Edugyan had achieved with her most recent book. I was wrong. Edugyan is an excellent writer and a great storyteller.
Half-Blood Blues moves between the early years of World War II and 1992. The Hot-Time Swingers were a jazz band featuring Chip Jones on drums, Sidney Griffiths on bass, Paul Butterstein on piano, Big Fritz on clarinet, the incomparable Hiero (Hieronymous) Falk on trumpet, along with their manager Ernst von Haselberg, filling in sometimes. In 1939, in Berlin, they have fallen on hard times. They are not able to play gigs anymore; Hiero was considered a "mischling," with a German mother and an African father, Paul was Jewish, and Chip and Sid were African-American. And they were playing jazz in Nazi Germany, which wasn't the best career choice. As the threat of war looms and their lives become more precarious a potential lifeline appears. Famed trumpeter and bandleader Louis Armstrong is in Paris. He has heard of them and he is interested in playing with them; he is particularly interested in playing with Hiero, whom he dubs the young Louis. If the Hot-Time Swingers can get papers to leave Germany before the war starts, they might be safe and working again, but complications arise.
The narrative moves back and forth between the war years and 1992 when the first jazz festival devoted to Falk is taking place. Sid, who is telling the story, and Chip offer different answers to the questions about what might have led the Nazis to detain Falk, and what happened to him. They both go on a journey to find some answers.
This is a wonderful story about jazz, the war, memory, old grudges, and jealousy, both professional and personal. Ably narrated by Kyle Riley.

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman  135 pp.

This continues the story of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, continuing from where the first book ended, with Valdek and Anja at the gates of Auschwitz. Depictions of life in the concentration/extermination camp are suitably dark. By probing into his father's story, the author learns the reasons for much of his father's behavior. Scenes from the holocaust are juxtaposed against scenes of Vladek's and Art's stormy relationship in the 1980s. It is not an easy book to read because of the subject matter and the bare, traumatic truth within. This is one of the books being read for the Great Stories Club at the Lieberman  Learning Center. I look forward discussing it with the teens.

My grandfather would have shot me

My grandfather would have shot me: a black woman discovers her family's Nazi past / Jennifer Teege & Nikola Sellmair, read by Robin Miles, 221 pgs.

Others have already written about this book so I'll focus here on how hard it must be to discover that your family history contains such a horrible person.  I mean, we all laugh about discovering the horse thief 4 generations back but what about a cruel murderer?  Jennifer Teege is in an odd position when she accidentally discovers a book that informs her of her family history.  As if there isn't enough weird stuff in life!  This is a woman who studied in Israel and speaks Hebrew.  All of that happened before she discovered her heritage.  Another small but interesting part is her telling of her adopted dad spending his final days trying to justify his own parents complicit attitudes during the war.  They were not active participants but fans. Years later, trying to deal with that was difficult for him...and that isn't even close to Jennifer's situation.  Interesting and I agree with Reneise, not for the lighthearted. 

Maus

Maus: A Survivor's Tale I: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman  159 pp.

I read this back when I first started working at the library. I re-read it now before re-reading the second volume for my book club at the alternative school. This is the award-winning and ground breaking graphic novel about Spiegelman's parents' experiences during the Holocaust. Spiegelman depicts the characters as animals: his family and other Jews are mice, the Poles are pigs, the French are frogs, Americans are dogs, and the Nazis are cats. This is the book that changed graphic novels into something more than just "comics."

My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me

My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past by Jennifer Teege & Nikola Sellmair  221 pp.

German born Jennifer Teege was 38 years old when she found a book in the library titled I Have to Love My Father, Don't I?. She was shocked to discover it was about her birth mother, Monika Göth who had put her up for adoption as a small child. Teege is the daughter of Göth and a Nigerian man. Her mother's father was the infamous SS-Hauptsturmführer Amon Göth, commandant of the Plaszów concentration camp near Kraków, Poland who would be played by actor Ralph Fiennes in the film "Schindler's List." The horrifying discovery of her ancestry and that the grandmother she adored was complicit by denying the deaths of thousands of Jews at the hands of her husband devasted Teege's entire life. The books tells the history of Amon Göth's brutality and how Teege was able to eventually come to grips with the knowledge that had he known her, her grandfather would have wanted her dead. Chapters alternate between the historical facts and Teege's personal experiences.

The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth

The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth, by Ken Krimstein, 233 pages.
I knew absolutely nothing about Hannah Arendt before I read this book. I am not proud of that, I'm just saying. This was an absolutely fascinating introduction to the German / Jewish philosopher, writer, and thinker. Arendt was a student of Heidigger, and for a time, his lover. After her affair with Heidigger ended, and as the Nazis came to power, Arendt has to make her first escape.
Krimstein's art and story reinforce each other and strengthen the narrative, and it is quite a narrative. Arendt and her mother have to escape the Nazi's again, moving first to Paris and then on to Portugal before finally ending up in the United States. She knew many of the great thinkers of the day, from Einstein to Brecht. She taught at Princeton and penned some of the most important works of the twentieth-century including The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Eichmann in Jerusalem.
A fascinating look at an extraordinary thinker. Easily my favorite piece of graphic literature of the last couple of years.

The Soul of a Thief

The Soul of a Thief by Steven Hartov, 293 pages.

Shtefan Brandt finds himself in the unusual and unenviable position of serving in the Waffen SS. As a young Jewish man (a Mischling, actually, son of a Jewish mother and Catholic father) this is not where he thought he would find himself. Brandt was working in a Viennese hospital when he was chosen to serve as the adjutant to a reckless, rule-breaking, war hero of an SS officer, Colonel Himmel. Rumors of his parentage haunt Brandt, and he has to hope that his false papers hold up well. Himmel doesn't care who
Brandt really is, just as long as he does his job. But when Brandt falls in love with the French mistress of the Colonel, he and the young woman find themselves in deepening jeopardy.

The Trick

The Trick by Emanuel Bergmann, 375 pages.

Two parallel stories, one of the Great Zabbatini, a Jew performing in a European circus as World War II looms, and the second concerning a ten-year-old boy name Max in present day California. While the story of Zabbatini, his childhood, his fleeing towards the circus and his time trying to pass as a Persian magician while living in Nazi Germany was well done. The present day story lacked a  single sympathetic or likable character, Max and his parents seem not to posses a single redeeming feature between the three of them. Zabbatini is still haunted by the war, but this haunting manifests itself in his being a giant asshole to everyone he meets. The plot never really clicks either, Overall, not my favorite.

The Lost Letter

The Lost Letter by Jillian Cantor, 322 pages.
The introductory story lets us see someone trying unsuccessfully to post a letter in Austria during the war.
We then see the parallel stories of Kate and her father in modern-day L.A. and of young German, Kristoff, and the Jewish family with whom he works, Frederick Faber, his wife and two daughters. Faber is an engraver, frequently employed by the Austrian government. Kristoff is hired to assist him, and begins to learn the craft. Faber's older daughter, Elena, is also secretly teaching herself the art of engraving.
Back in L.A. with Kate where she is trying to deal with her father's increasing dementia, and to find a home for his stamp collection. One stamp in particular leads Kate and a local philetalist, Benjamin, back toward Kristioff's relationship with Elana and their fate when the family runs afoul of the Nazis in the first year after the Anschluss.

Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers

Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers by Guenter Lewy, 195 pages.
Lewy seems to be wanting to get to some definitive answers as to the motives of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, without going too far in any one direction. The book is massively sourced and footnoted,  with  over 30 pages of source material, and 156 footnotes in the second chapter alone. At the same time, with only 136 pages of text including the introduction, he doesn't seem to leave himself a lot of room to explore his several topics in depth.
He covers the concentration camps, deaths by shootings, the development of more efficient ways of killing (seeking to avoid stresses on the killers), the hunt for and trials of those responsible, all while trying to give individual and group motivations for killing thousands and thousands of people. An interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying book.

The Orphan's Tale

The Orphan's Tale by Pam Jenoff, 344 pages.

Decent enough story involving circus folk, orphans, angry adolescents, greed, betrayal and nazis. None of it rings quite true, though;the strarving teen who is found by the circus folk just happened to be a world -class gymnast? And though it's several years into the war the Jewish circus performer who married a German officer is somehow surprised to find out that there's a bit of official antipathy borne by the German government towards Jews?
If you can get past the author's seeming unfamiliarity with her chosen setting, the book is alright.

The book of Aron

The book of Aron / Jim Shepard 259 pgs.

A beautifully written book about an ugly topic.  Aron is a young boy in Poland whose family moves into the Jewish ghetto by the Germans who occupy Poland.  Slowly, his family is taken from him by illness, and labor camps.  He ends up in the orphanage run by Janusz Korczak but the ravages of illness, poverty and over crowding do not make for a lot of comfort.

Aron is a bit strange but is fairly self-sufficient. He joins a gang and helps to support his family with his dealings, ability to steal food and smuggle items.  All of his efforts do not prevent the horrors of the reality.  Things just keep getting worse.

Janusz Korczak is a real person and the story told here is mostly true.  It is horrible and sad and full of lice and illness.  An important work that will bring tears to your eyes.

The Jewish Dog / Asher Kravitz, trans. by Michal Kessler, 239 pp.

A dog's-eye view of the Holocaust.  Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

But this is a bestseller in Israel, so maybe I'm missing something.

Caleb is born into a picture-perfect Jewish family in Stuttgart.  He winds up with the family of an SS officer, then as a guard dog at Treblinka, where he meets - you guessed it - the son from the picture-perfect family, who always loved him best.

Apart from the wholly predictable story line, the author attempts to use ironic humor throughout.  And in my opinion, it takes an extraordinarily gifted writer to tell a Holocaust story from the point of view of a dog using ironic humor.  My advice:  don't try it.

The Book of Aron: a Novel / Jim Shepard 259 pp.

An achingly sad fictional presentation of the story of Dr. Janusz Korczak, a pediatrician who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. He had many opportunities to leave the ghetto: the Ghetto's Jewish police many times tried to take him out, and there are hints in the novel that even the Gestapo wanted him saved, although the reasons are not clear. He repeatedly insisted that he would only be rescued if the 200 children in his care were also. This wasn't possible, and so he was gassed at Treblinka with them.

The story is told from the point of view of Aron, a growth-stunted boy who after a brief smuggling career in the Ghetto winds up orphaned and in the care of Pan Doctor. The events here are almost entirely bleak but still illuminated by the spirit of the Doctor. The dialogues and relationships here are sketched beautifully.

If This Is a Man / Primo Levi 205 pp.

If This Is a Man is the first item in this massive, 3-volume, 3,000 page new Complete Works.  Because it was originally published as a stand-alone piece, I think it's fair to get credit for it as one item translated from Italian.  Levi wrote this shortly after his return from Auschwitz to Turin.

At this point I've read quite a few personal narratives of the Holocaust, and I now wonder how many of those writers weren't directly or unconsciously influenced by Levi.  It seems to me almost an alpha narrative, to which all the others are a sort of response.  Although Levi's experience was not particularly representative -  'only' one year in Auschwitz as an Italian Jew who was 'fortunate' to wind up assigned  to an indoor chemistry lab - it is so beautifully, intelligently, written, so free of melodrama, so carefully observed, that he seems to have laid the groundwork for the entire discussion of events that took place during the period.  He is especially astute regarding what it took to survive, and how, or whether, it was possible to remain a man throughout.

Stuart Woolf's  translation is fluid and unobtrusive.

The Kiss / Scott E. Blumenthal 303 p.

A trio of Klezmer musicians forms in Rovno, Poland, in 1939.  Their music makes people weep or feel joy like they've never known.  As they travel to Moscow and back, playing for their living, stories begin to spread, that the harp played by Aron was once played by King David, and that the music can bring the dead back to life.  Well constructed, fast paced, and suspenseful.  But also facile, hokey, and very TV movie.  (a 1970s TV movie, that is).