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4.15 AVERAGE
4.15 AVERAGE
Een fascinerende, deprimerende geschiedenis. Heel erg goed geschreven.
challenging
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced
A detailed and personal account of the author's search to learn more about her mother, an enigmatic figure whose traumatic experiences during WWII colored the rest of her life and the lives of her children. With only a scant bit of information, Wodin begins her quest online, connecting with other family history researchers, genealogists, survivors, and more. Each foray into the life of her mother's immediate family reveals more heartbreak and suffering, but these are stories worth telling and remembering, including details of the Nazi's forced work camps in which residents of Eastern Europe were sent to Germany to work; the looting and violence that occurred during the chaos of the Russian Revolution; and the coping mechanisms victims found--or couldn't find--in the aftermath. At times the writing is a bit clunky, and sometimes the side-trips aren't well integrated into the primary purpose of the book, but overall it is a testament to the need for historical records and documents and evidence, and to the author's determination to learn about her family.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
This magnificent memoir explodes upon the reader, revealing the lives of the author's ancestors from pre-Revolutionary times in the Russian empire when they were wealthy merchants in Mariupol, through the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Ukrainian Revolution, the Holodomor, Stalin terror years, Siberian exile, World War II occupied Ukraine and also the Nazi slave raids where Ukrainians were captured and shipped to the Reich where they were worked and starved to death by the millions. The memoir begins and ends with the author as a beaten and downtrodden refugee in Germany.
This is a vast story to tell and Wodin's method is akin to smashing open one egg at a time in a big nest of them. Any one of the many historical eras had enough experience for an entire book (on a few occasions, a single paragraph could have made a book) and so while a vast history of a family is uncovered, I kept on wanting more detail in each of the eras.
Kudos to Natascha Wodin for writing about her family's experiences during so many times of Soviet and German history that have been propagandized and hidden.
#netgalley #nataschawodin
This is a vast story to tell and Wodin's method is akin to smashing open one egg at a time in a big nest of them. Any one of the many historical eras had enough experience for an entire book (on a few occasions, a single paragraph could have made a book) and so while a vast history of a family is uncovered, I kept on wanting more detail in each of the eras.
Kudos to Natascha Wodin for writing about her family's experiences during so many times of Soviet and German history that have been propagandized and hidden.
#netgalley #nataschawodin
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
dark
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
I started this book without any expectations and I was pleasantly surprised. I know almost nothing about this chapter in the history of Eastern Europe, so it was a really eye-opening reading experience, if extremely sad and harrowing.
I think that if you like family sagas in your fiction, you might like this memoir as well. There is an element of mystery as you gradually discover, alongside the author, her family history that keeps you engaged and that can also surprise you.
I liked the writing style and there were some sections of nature writing that I appreciated particularly, and usually I am really not a big fan of nature writing.
The author also includes many different means of narration (e-mails and letters, a family member's diary, extracts from other texts, even photographs), and this makes for a varied and more engaging storytelling.
The web of familial relationships gets progressively more complex and it can become a little confusing (especially because a family tree is not included, at least in my digital copy), so that at times I struggled to remeber who someone was and how they were related to someone else and I had to just go with the flow.
Also, there are many brutal sections that are hard to get through, and I completely understand their presence in the book given the subject matter, but I found some parts a bit too graphic in their details, and unnecessarily sofor example, I don't think that including a scene where, after a bombing, her maternal aunt is carring a young man's intestines is going to add anything vital to the narrative.
I think that if you like family sagas in your fiction, you might like this memoir as well. There is an element of mystery as you gradually discover, alongside the author, her family history that keeps you engaged and that can also surprise you.
I liked the writing style and there were some sections of nature writing that I appreciated particularly, and usually I am really not a big fan of nature writing.
The author also includes many different means of narration (e-mails and letters, a family member's diary, extracts from other texts, even photographs), and this makes for a varied and more engaging storytelling.
The web of familial relationships gets progressively more complex and it can become a little confusing (especially because a family tree is not included, at least in my digital copy), so that at times I struggled to remeber who someone was and how they were related to someone else and I had to just go with the flow.
Also, there are many brutal sections that are hard to get through, and I completely understand their presence in the book given the subject matter, but I found some parts a bit too graphic in their details, and unnecessarily so
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Death, Domestic abuse, Genocide, Gore, Mental illness, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Violence, Xenophobia, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, War, Deportation
Moderate: Alcoholism, Gun violence, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Antisemitism, Medical content, Cannibalism, Sexual harassment, Classism
Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Animal death, Cancer, Chronic illness, Incest, Suicidal thoughts, Torture, Blood, Vomit, Abortion, Fire/Fire injury, Injury/Injury detail
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
slow-paced