Arts

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IBEDIOIRS

Author Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, like
most survivors of the Holocaust, strug-
gled to build a normal life for herself.
Decades later, she realized that in her
efforts to achieve normalcy, she had not
spoken to her children or her grandchil-
dren of her terrifying ordeal. Inherit the
Truth (St Martin's Press; $22.95) is her
memoir of the period between 1939
and 1942 detailing the destruction of
her talented Jewish family, as well as her
and her sister's survival.
The Cap: The Price of a Life (Grove
Press; $24.00) is author Roman
Frister's attempt to explain how the
Holocaust experience could cause one
to act immorally to save one's life. In
the face of the Nazi death machine,
the author portrays himself as a man
who does whatever it takes to survive.
Frister emigrated from Poland to Israel
in 1957, where he served as editor and
reporter for the leading Israeli daily,
Ha'artez. He currently runs the Koteret
School of Journalism.
The Hours After — Letters of Love
and Longing in War's Aftermath (St.
Martin's Press; $23.95) is the love
story of a Holocaust survivor and the
German-born American soldier who
liberated her. Authors Gerda
Weissmann Klein and Kurt Klein
chronicle their-story with letters
reflecting upon the horrors of war
and genocide and the salvation of
true love. The Kleins' story appears in
the film Testimony, shown around the
clock at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C.
A true story of survival and sac-
rifice, To See You Again (Penguin
Books Ltd; $23.95) follows the life of
author Betty Schimmel. The Nazis
separate Schimmel from her lover in
1944 Hungary. From liberation to
her marriage to an Auschwitz survivor
who takes her to a new life in
America through the joy and struggle
of raising three children, the author
never forgets her first love. Then, in
1975, she returns to Budapest and
sees someone across a crowded room.

HOLOCAUST
PERSPECTIVES

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Selling the Holocaust (Routledge;
$22.95) is an account of the meaning
of the Holocaust at the end of the 20th
Century. Author Tim Cole examines
three of the Holocaust's most distinc-
tive figures — Anne Frank, Adolf
Eichmann and Oskar Schindler — and
three of the Holocaust's most visited
sites, Auschwitz, Yad Vashem and the

United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, to show how the Holocaust
has been mythologized in the popular
imagination. Cole currently serves as
the Pearl Resnick Resident Scholar at
the Center for Advanced Holocaust
Studies at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum.
Was the American Jewish com-
munity powerless to intervene dur-
ing the Holocaust years? In Heroes,
Antiheroes and the Holocaust
(Gefen Publishing House; $24.95),
author David Morrison focuses on
what Jewish leaders like Rabbi
Stephen Wise, Rabbi Abba Hillel
Silver and Nachum Goldman knew
about the Holocaust, when they
knew it and what, if anything, they
did about it. A practicing psychia-
trist in the United States for 20
years, Morrison now lives in Israel
and devotes his time researching
contemporary Jewish history.

end of the war, Tilles finds himself in
charge of carrying out the sentences of
the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

BIOGRAPHIES

For Alma Rosé: Vienna to
Auschwitz (Amadeus; $29.95), jour-
nalist Richard Newman spent more
than two decades researching the life
of violinist Alma Rose, a Viennese Jew
from a noted musical family who was
deported to Auschwitz. There, Rose
organized her fellow inmates into an
all-female orchestra and ended up sav-
ing a dozen women's lives. (Rose was-
n't as lucky and died of illness before
she could leave the camp.) A version
of Rose's story can be seen in 1980's
Playing for Time, for which Arthur
Miller wrote the teleplay.
In The Good Listener: Helen
Bamber, A Life Against Cruelty
(Pantheon Books; $27.00), Neil Belton

Parnas, (Harcourt Brace; $14.95) by
Silvano Arieti, re-creates the final days
of Giuseppe Pardo Rogues, the parnas,
or president, of the Jewish congrega-
tion of Pisa, Italy. Pardo remained in
Pisa during the Nazi invasion and
Arieti, a renowned psychoanalyst,
imagines what took place in the home
— and in the mind — of this devout
and tormented man in the last days of
his life.
The Book ofBlam (Harcourt Brace;
$23.00), first published in Yugoslavia
in 1982, is a novel of life in a Balkan
city, during and after the war.
Aleksandar Tioma, a well-known
Serbo-Croatian novelist, raises unan-
swerable questions as he re-creates what
happened to his native land during the
Holocaust. Through his hero, lvtiroslav
Blam, Tisma tells the story of the ulti-
mate price of survival.

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A roundup of recent books on the Holocaust.

SHARI ZINGLE
Special to the Jewish News

BEYOND TEE WAR

Author Fern Schumer Chapman is
the daughter of a Holocaust escapee. In
her memoir Motherland Beyond the
Holocaust — A Daughter's Journey to
Reclaim the Past (Viking; $23.95), she
returns to Germany with her mother.
The book explores their trip and its
far-reaching consequences. Chapman is
a former reporter for the Chicago
Tribune and Forbes and has taught at
Northwestern University's Medill
School of Journalism.
In The County of Birches (St.
Martin's Press; $21.95), Judith Kalman
explores the psychological reality of the
Holocaust's second generation. Told
from a child's perspective, this collec-
tion of autobiographical stories details
a Jewish family's emigration from
World War II Europe to North
America.
Stanley Tilles, an ordinary citizen
soldier during World War II, authors
By the Neck Until Dead: The Gallows
of Nuremberg (Dona Books; $12.95).
Answering the call of his country at the

tells the story of an otherwise ordinary
woman who has devoted her life to
documenting, resisting and healing the
effects of politically sanctioned torture.
Helen Bamber, now well into her 70s,
has since1985 led the Medical
Foundation for the Care and Victims
of Torture. Bomber's journey toward
her vocation makes up the greater part
of Belton's narrative.
A Quiet American: The Secret War
of Varian Fry (St. Martin's Press;
$26.95) is author Andy Marino's saga
of one unknown American's successful
efforts to save some of Europe's most
prominent artists and intellectuals from
the Nazis. Fry built an elaborate under-
ground rescue network that managed to
spirit away Marc Chagall, Heinrich
Mann, Hannah Arendt and Franz
Werfel, among many others. In 1996,
Fry was the first American to be named
"Righteous Among the Nations."

■•■

Howcausir FICTION

Newly reissued in paperback, The

Theatrical Performance During the
Holocaust (The John Hopkins
University Press; $39.95), by Rebecca
Rovit and Alvin Goldfarb, is a collec-
tion of essays, memoirs and documents
relating to the history of Jewish drama,
cabaret, music and opera under the
Third Reich. Rovit is a theater histori-
an who has written widely on perfor-
mance and the Holocaust. Alvin
Goldfarb is a professor of theater at
Illinois State University.
Holocaust Portfolio (Midmarch Arts
Press; $22.00) is a collection of artist
Jeanie E. Neyer's paintings and draw-
ings that reflects all the stages of geno-
cide and captures images of her emo-
tions in response to many aspects of
the Holocaust. Neyer is a graduate of
Sarah Lawrence College and has been a
professional painter for most of her life.
Her work has been exhibited in major
museums in the United States and
abroad.
In 1977, James E. Young was the
only foreigner and only Jew appointed
to a German commission to find an
appropriate design for a national
memorial in Berlin to the European
Jews killed in World War II. In At
Memory's Edge: After-Images of the
Holocaust in Contemporary Art and
Literature (Yale University Press;
$35.00), Young tells the story of the
controversial project and also the con-
troversy surrounding Berlin's newly
opened Jewish museum. He also
examines the works of other artists,
born after the Holocaust, but marked
by its memory. ❑

