Amazon recommended this book to me b/c I ordered Austerlitz and forgot how much I disliked it. I usually love holocaust literature, but this isn't holocaust literature. Unfortunately Kirkus Review and a few other literary reviews give high marks to any book mentioning a Jewish character. They will give high marks to any book mentioning the holocaust. Really you can skip this one. The author was born in 1944. He has no personal experience with the holocaust, and he did not grow up knowing Jews. Like most Germans he tries to deal with the German holocaust guilt or to appear to deal with it. How do you live down the greatest crime in human history? The author is well regarded in literary circles so I suppose this book would be an acceptable subject for a college paper. Maybe no one wants to admit that they don''t get it and appear to be uncouth. I do not know what the genre is. There are real photographs and real events. I can't tell if the subjects are entirely fiction or they were real people which the author has embellished. Maybe he is trying to portray the German concept of pleasure in another's pain. The Germans have a non-translatable word for it which escapes me at the moment. I just don't know. The book describes 4 tragic subjects all of whom are German emigres living elsewhere. The best two in my opinion are Ambros Adelwarth and Paul Bereyter neither of whom are Jewish. Paul is an acclaimed lower school teacher who is dismissed from his job b/c he has a Jewish grandfather. He is a born teacher who leaves to teach in France and elsewhere. However, he is German to the core. He loves a country and a culture that does not love him.
Nevertheless, he returns to Germany and is accepted as a motor pool driver in the German army. He is never really happy. Ambros is not Jewish. He emigrates to New York before the war. There he takes a position as a domestic servant in the household of the wealthy Jewish Solomen family of Long Island. Gradually, he becomes the personal valet and companion to the son of the family scion, Cosmos. Clearly, they are lovers and the raciness of their closeted relationship was the most interesting subject of this book. They travel the world together. Dr. Selwyn's German speaking Jewish family was on its way to the U.S. from Lithuania. His father used the passage money to buy into a lens grinding business in London where the family stayed. Dr. Selwyn won a scholarship to medical school in Cambridge. He practiced medicine in Britain both before and after the war. No one in his immediate family perishes in the holocaust as they were all living in England. He was ashamed of his Jewishness and his German speaking heritage. He anglicized his name and married a non-Jewish woman. The holocaust which surely killed his Lithuanian relatives affected him emotionally. However, he could not even discuss his sadness or feelings of loss with his wife b/c he was so insecure about his ethnicity. He simply did not want to call attention to it. Max Ferber was a moderately successful Jewish artist living in England. At age 15 shortly after cristalnacht, his affluent German Jewish parents secured an English visa for him and sent him to live with his single displaced uncle in Britain. The plan was that they would join him when their exit visas came through. Of course, they never did and except for the uncle Ferber's entire family perishes in the holocaust. After the war the uncle invites Max to move with him to the U.S. Max declines and instead moves to the gritty industrial non-artsy city of Manchester. Max's tragedy is that he never allows himself to enjoy much of what life has to offer. He consigns himself to an ugly industrialized part of Manchester though he could afford more. This book is slightly more interesting than watching paint dry, but not much. If you want to read about interesting often flawed Jewish characters, read Fabulous Small Jews instead.
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