Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein.
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture A Holocaust story of incredible luck, breathtaking bravery and incalculable loss
My Name is Selma: The Remarkable Memoir of a Jewish Resistance Fighter and Ravensbrück Survivor By Selma van de Perre; translated by Alice Tetley-Paul and Anna Asbury Scribner, 224 pages, $27 And still the stories keep coming. At 98, Selma van de Perre has published her first book, a memoir about her activities in the…
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Culture After Kristallnacht, a hunger artist confronts a splintering world
The Passenger By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz; translated by Philip Boehm; preface by André Aciman Henry Holt and Company/Metropolitan Books, 266 pages, $24.99 A feverish urgency infuses Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s rediscovered novel about a frantic German Jewish businessman after Kristallnacht, an internal refugee whose doomed travels both echoed and prefigured the author’s own. Boschwitz’s Jewish father…
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Culture As in ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ small disasters foretell the destruction of a world
The Slaughterman’s Daughter By Yaniv Iczkovits; translated from the Hebrew by Orr Scharf Schocken Books, 515 pages, $28.99 As history, family lore, and Yiddish fiction all attest, the 19th-century Russian Empire held numerous dangers for Jews in the Pale of Settlement: grinding poverty, pogroms, conscription into the Czar’s army. Sholem Aleichem’s folkloric stories mined this…
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Culture Digging into Holocaust history and finding a sort of gold
Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure By Menachem Kaiser Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 277 pages, $27 Menachem Kaiser’s third-generation Holocaust memoir, in keeping with the genre, is an act of reclamation – or at least an attempt at one. In “Plunder,” Kaiser admits to the limits of his project and confesses his envy…
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Culture Who murdered a Nazi fugitive — and does the answer actually matter?
The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive By Philippe Sands Alfred A. Knopf, 417 pages, $30 “It is more important to understand the butcher than the victim,” the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas told Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London. That seems a questionable assertion, not least…
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Culture In Jerusalem, where lives intersect thrillingly — and sometimes violently
City of a Thousand Gates By Rebecca Sacks Harper, 384 pages, $27.99 As her epigraph suggests, Rebecca Sacks’ lovely debut novel, “City of a Thousand Gates,” concerns the impact of “the high drama of history” on individual lives. The phrase is drawn from Robert Musil’s philosophical novel, “The Man Without Qualities.” Here the lives are…
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Culture Long after the Kindertransport, the trauma remained
The Berlin Shadow: Living with the Ghosts of the Kindertransport By Jonathan Lichtenstein Little, Brown Spark, 311 pages, $28 Destroyed and divided, then rebuilt and reunified, Berlin is at once defiantly modern and haunted by history. In Jonathan Lichtenstein’s memoir, “The Berlin Shadow,” the city’s ghosts are even more present and powerful in its cafés…
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Culture After the Holocaust, displaced by indifference and paralysis
The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War By David Nasaw Penguin Press, 654 pages, $35 In the aftermath of World War II, Europe was in chaos, with millions homeless and in flight from violence, persecution or retribution for wartime crimes. Some had survived concentration camps; others had been forced laborers…
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