New Books Trace the Holocaust’s Legacy
The Holocaust and its legacy remain an enduring subject for writers. Works coming this fall include a new novel by Amos Oz and the biography of a document forger for the French resistance during World War II.
Mischling
By Affinity Konar (Sept. 6)
This debut novel tackles a horrific subject: twin sisters who endure Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz and then become separated. Booksellers have been buzzing about it since BookExpo America in May, calling the prose “lyrical,” “magical,” “inventive, and even occasionally playful.” The twins, Pearl and Stasha, tell their stories in alternating chapters. At the camp, they divide the responsibilities of living: “Stasha would take the funny, the future, the bad. I would take the sad, the past, the good.”
Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life
By Sarah Kaminsky (Sept. 13)
For much of her life, Sarah Kaminsky knew little of her father’s experiences in World War II aside from occasional references to him as a “fighter.” When he was 77, she finally pushed him to reveal his secret: At 17 years old, because of his experience working with dyes at a dry cleaner, he was recruited by the French resistance to forge documents. He created papers that saved 14,000 Jews. He continued to lead a double life until the 1970s, forging IDs for people around the world whom he believed were being persecuted or oppressed. Ms. Kaminsky’s TED Talk has been watched more than 560,000 times.
The Gustav Sonata
By Rose Tremain (Sept. 27)
The thirteenth novel by Ms. Tremain is told in three parts spanning six decades. It begins in Switzerland in the 1950s, as the country is emerging from World War II. The protagonist Gustav Perle, whose widowed mother urges him to show restraint and neutrality “like Switzerland,” forges a childhood friendship with a Jewish boy in his class. Reviewing the book for the Guardian, Marcel Theroux described it as “a masterclass in naturalistic fiction: spare, deeply imagined and full of small gestures that draw the reader in towards deeper mysteries.”
Irena’s Children: A True Story of Courage
By Tilar J. Mazzeo (Sept. 27)
In 1942, a social worker named Irena Sendler was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public-health specialist. Coordinating the efforts of about 20 people, she went on to save an estimated 2,500 children from the Nazis, smuggling them out of the walled district, finding safe homes for them, and keeping lists of their names buried in bottles under a friend’s apple tree. Ms. Mazzeo, author of the best-selling “The Widow Clicquot,” draws from interviews with Sendler’s daughter and children she saved to offer new details on Sendler’s early life and her remarkable undertaking during World War II.
Judas
By Amos Oz (Nov. 8)
The Israeli writer’s memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” hit movie theaters in August in an adaptation written and directed by Natalie Portman . Now comes the English-language edition of his latest novel, “Judas,” which was published in Hebrew in 2014. Set in Jerusalem in the winter of 1959 and 1960, it explores Israel’s founding after World War II through the interplay of five characters—three living and two dead.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-books-trace-the-holocausts-legacy-1472664612
