lindasdarby's review against another edition
5.0
This book was fascinating. I loved it so much. It is dense and at times hard to read. Once again I am amazed at the way humans behave. I also loved all of the heartwarming stories and relationships. This made me want to do genealogy and also to write down the stories of my parents and families. I will be honest that I skipped all of the bible and Torah parts. I wanted to find out what happened to his family and didn't care about the superfluous parts. As I read this I had to remind myself, this happened this is real. It was really, really a great book
jleaabell's review against another edition
3.0
I hope to come back to it at another time and finish. I just don't seem to have the right mind set for this book right now.
grazanne's review against another edition
4.0
This book is about a man's search for 6 of his family members who perished in the Holocaust in a small Polish town. It is told in a circular fashion from present to past to biblical times. It personalized the Holocaust for me in a way that had not been previously done.
kdhanda's review against another edition
4.0
What an intense book. All books about the Holocaust are intense but this account is deeply personal wherein the author goes back to search for what happened to his six relatives that perished during the Holocaust. The book is divided into five parts and each part is anchored with a section from the Torah. As a non-Jewish person, these passages were confusing and seemed removed from the main story though the author did use the passages to link the teachings from the Torah to his own personal odyssey. It is a tough book, the details are searing and brutal. It is also very long, at about 650 pages. The author repeats a lot of information, again and again, in a way to hammer the details in the readers mind, as if we were likely to forget. However, a good editor could have helped in cutting about 200 pages. Other than this redundancy - that requires a lot of patience to get through - it a brilliant non-fiction account of one man's search for his long-lost ancestors.
xxstefaniereadsxx's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.0
This the the story of a child who grew up in a family who was hurt and haunted by the loss of six of their family members during the Holocaust. As an adult, the author discovered some letters with shocking information and started a search for the truth about what happened to those missing members and what the ramifications really were for the entire family. I hate to say I like books on this subject, but this was an interesting and moving read. I'm glad that I picked this one up.
susanatwestofmars's review against another edition
1.0
I read this years ago in my book club, and it's lingered with me because it was so brutal in its depictions of how the Nazis actually treated the Jews that I couldn't finish it. In fact, that's an understatement. A big, fat, gross one.
This book signalled, to me, that how we talked about the Holocaust was changing. We were done whitewashing the cruelty and brutality shown by one human being to another. It was time to let the world know exactly how horrific it was.
To this day, it makes me sick.
So it's not fair to give the book one star for shaking me so badly and so significantly to my core. The truth is that this book did exactly what it was supposed to do -- it got an emotional reaction out of me. In that, it was brilliant. Five stars.
But I couldn't finish the book because of how deeply it touched me. I'm the minority, I know, and I could probably pick this up at this point in time, I think ten years later, and not be as badly bothered by it as I was back then. I'm not going to, though. Because now, not only does the book resonate with its story, it also contains my reaction when I reached certain passages and had to put it down.
And I still question, especially in the political climate of right now, just how the hell we can do that to each other. How can someone abandon their humanity so completely?
This book signalled, to me, that how we talked about the Holocaust was changing. We were done whitewashing the cruelty and brutality shown by one human being to another. It was time to let the world know exactly how horrific it was.
To this day, it makes me sick.
So it's not fair to give the book one star for shaking me so badly and so significantly to my core. The truth is that this book did exactly what it was supposed to do -- it got an emotional reaction out of me. In that, it was brilliant. Five stars.
But I couldn't finish the book because of how deeply it touched me. I'm the minority, I know, and I could probably pick this up at this point in time, I think ten years later, and not be as badly bothered by it as I was back then. I'm not going to, though. Because now, not only does the book resonate with its story, it also contains my reaction when I reached certain passages and had to put it down.
And I still question, especially in the political climate of right now, just how the hell we can do that to each other. How can someone abandon their humanity so completely?
pipsy's review against another edition
1.0
I'm on page 30 and either the author is terrible at writing and coherence, or the translator in Portugal messed up. So many incongruities and grammatical errors...
I honestly don't know if I should insist on reading it...
I honestly don't know if I should insist on reading it...