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Between The Pages

April 19 is Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Here, a roundup of new and recent books on the subject.

Gail Zimmerman

Arts Editor

NONFICTION

A Century of Wisdom: Lessons
from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer,
the World's Oldest Living Holocaust
Survivor (Spiegel & Grau), by Caroline
Stoessinger, with an introduction by Vadav
Havel, is the story of Herz-Sommer's life
and times and steady optimistic outlook.
Stoessinger, a pianist and musical director,
wrote the book based on interviews with
Herz-Sommer, now 108, who still practices
piano several hours a day in her London
home. Herz-Sommer survived internment
in the Theresienstadt concentration camp,
where she played in many concerts for fel-
low inmates and for the Nazis.

In Prague Winter: A Personal Story
of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
(HarperCollins), former Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright writes from personal
and historical perspectives of her early
years in Czechoslovakia during the Nazi
occupation and the Cold War years, under-
lining events that shaped her life and career.

The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary
Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece,
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (Knopf),
by Anne-Marie O'Connor, features Klimt's
famous and gorgeous painting on its cover.
Klimt's subject was a regal Jewish woman,
an art patron, the daughter of a banker
and an intellectual who was married and
childless. Both the artist and model died
before Vienna welcomed Hitler, and the
portrait was a jewel among the artwork
pilfered by the Nazis — although they
stripped her Jewish surname from the
painting when displaying it. The book is
a social history that also follows the trail
of the painting after the war — it made
headlines again in 2006 when Ronald
Lauder bought it a century after Klimt
completed it, for $135 million.

In the memoir Two Rings: A Story of
Love and War (Public Affairs), by Millie
Werber and Eve Keller, Millie shares her
past as a teenage girl during the war,
facing death many times, and her most
precious, private memory: of a man to
whom she was married for only a few
brief months. Her first great, uncon-
ditional passion, Heniek was a Jewish
policeman, a guard in the armaments
factory where she worked, who was
betrayed by another Jewish guard. He
died, leaving Millie with a single photo-
graph of the two of them and two rings
of gold, which she managed to carry
with her throughout the war and cherish
through the interceding years.

Journalist Andrew Nagorski's
Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses
to the Nazi Rise to Power (Simon and
Schuster) is a history employing dis-
patches, diaries, letters and interviews
of American journalists, diplomats and
others who were present in Berlin dur-
ing Weimar and then Hitler's Germany.
Nagorski explains that some Americans
were merely casual observers, others
deliberately blind, a few Nazi apologists.
Even as they came to understand the hor-
ror, most found it difficult to grasp the
breadth of the looming catastrophe.
Among those present on the scene:
diplomats and government officers
George Kennan and Richard Helms; visi-
tors including writers Sinclair Lewis and
Thomas Wolfe, aviator Charles Lindbergh,
newspaper publisher William Randolph
Hearst; historian W.E.B. Dubois; and jour-
nalists Howard K. Smith and 'William L.
Shirer.
Both hardcover and paperback 50th-
anniversary editions of Shirer's monu-
mental study of Hitler's Nazi empire, The
Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich (Simon
and Schuster), with a new introduction by
Ron Rosenbaum (Explaining Hitler) shed-
ding new light, were released last fall.

The Last Bright Days: A Young
Woman's Life in a Lithuanian Shtetl
on the Eve of the Holocaust (Jewish
Heritage), edited by Frank Buonaguiro, is
a photographic portrait of Jewish life in
the 1930s in Kavarsk. As a young woman,
Belle Delechky was the town's photog-
rapher at a time when few had cameras.
When she left in 1939, she brought hun-
dreds of photographs and dozens of jour-
nals, which are also drawn upon in this
striking volume.

Mark Jacobson, a reporter whose New
York magazine profile of drug lord Frank
Lucas was turned into the 2007 hit movie
American Gangster, is a New York Jew
born to a father who fought in World
War II. When he gets a package from a
friend in New Orleans — with a mid-
20th-century lampshade inside that had
been found at a rummage sale — he sets
out to find out who made it and who it
might once have been. The Lampshade:
A Holocaust Detective Story from
Buchenwald to New Orleans (Simon and
Schuster) chronicles the author's journey,
which takes him all over the world.

In Crossing the Borders of Time:
A True Story of War, Exile and Love
Reclaimed (Other Press), investigative
reporter Leslie Maitland provides a non-
fiction account spanning six decades in
the life of her mother, examining Jewish
life in Germany before and after the Nazis,
in Occupied France, in a little-known
Cuban detention camp and in the emigre
community of New York City's "Fourth
Reich:' where she builds a life with a
dynamic American husband. Maitland
also writes of her mother's 50-year hope
of reuniting with her beloved fiance, a
Catholic Frenchman she left behind.

In Theo Coster's We All Wore Stars:
Memories of Anne Frank from Her
Classmates (Palgrave-McMillan), he

and five of Anne's classmates at the
Amsterdam Jewish Lyceum remember
the girl they knew and share their own
remarkable stories of survival. Coster
is the executive producer of the 2008
documentary film The Classmates of Anne
Frank.

The Nazi Seance: The Strange Story
of the Jewish Psychic in Hitler's Circle
(Palgrave-McMillan), by Arthur Magida,
tells the tale of Erik Jan Hanussen, a popu-
lar Jewish stage magician and mentalist
from Austria whose perhaps greatest trick
was becoming Hitler's psychic and adviser,
moving comfortably in Nazi circles for
many years — before he came to the same
tragic end that so many of his fellow Jews
endured at the hands of the Nazis.

In On the Eve: The Jews of Europe
Before the Second World War (Simon
and Schuster, May), Bernard Wasserstein
examines the predicament of European
Jews in the 1930s, the realities of their
lives and the existential crisis they faced,
telling the collective story through the
narratives of dozens of individuals. The
author is a professor of modern European
Jewish history at the University of Chicago.

The first major study to examine the
origins of the "new Jewish architecture
historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's Building
After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture
and the Memory of the Holocaust (Yale
University Press) explores how Jewish
architects have risen to unprecedented
international prominence since World
War II, making pivotal contributions
to postwar architecture and also deci-
sively shaping Jewish architectural his-
tory. Many of their ideas are influenced
by Jewish themes, ideas and imagery.
Rosenfeld ascribes this notable cultural
development as the result of important
shifts in memory and identity since the
Holocaust.

Between The Pages on page 44

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April 19 • 2012

