CONVERSATIONS WITH AN EXECUTIONER: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto

CONVERSATIONS WITH AN EXECUTIONER: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto
KAZIMIERZ MOCZARSKI (tr. Sean Gasper Bye)
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the death of over 50,000 people: Jürgen Stroop.

For 255 days Stroop talks to Moczarski of his life, entirely unrepentant of the crimes for which he would soon be executed himself. Conversations with an Executioner is Moczarski's first-hand account of these extraordinary exchanges, an insight into the mind of one of history's most brutal war criminals, and one that unflinchingly examines some of humanity's darkest moments.

Never before published in the United Kingdom, Conversations with an Executioner is a book of enormous historical importance, written in masterful prose by a writer who tragically wouldn't survive to see his work published.

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My Review: Chilling, sobering, appalling, revolting.

If you're wondering who the January 6th/ICE criminals are when they're alone with their thoughts, this is the book to tell you the nauseating truth. A person of no curiosity, no accomplishments of mind, no apparent capacity for self-reflection or empathy. A creature of appetites without moral guardrails that he shared with his cellmate as he waited out his time before execution. A simple mind that craved the validation of his own importance received from patently manufactured myths of Honor and Valor in committing vile acts of cruelty, allowing him to believe his basest urges were noble...ennobling his acts. It really startles me that this guff works in the twenty-first century.

The author was only alive because the Stalinist government post-WWII wanted to physically (in the usual ways) and psychologically (by having him share a cell with Stroop) coerce him into admitting he told lies about their Stalinism's resemblance to Nazism. To resist them in his mind, he thoroughly interviewed Stroop, working the details into his memory, using the horrifying scum's self-confessed deeds to shore up his own rightness and righteousness.

It's here I have to confess that I wobble a little. Moczarski was in the cell with Stroop until his 1949 execution. Moczarski was not freed from the threat of execution and the actuality of torture until 1956, the post-Stalin awakening. He did not write stuff down in that cell. It's true that psychological abuse creates hypervigilance...I suffer from it...and a truly demonically exhaustive memory, but seven years of gap allows things to get muddled, some to get lost, most to fade.

Fact-checking what's fact-checkable doesn't turn up glaring obvious fabrications. But so very much of the stories' content is, at best, only checkable in broad strokes. I don't think Moczarski set out to exaggerate or to create more awful deeds than Moczarski spoke of. I think he told the truth about what he was told. It's still hard for me to say I think his account is inerrant; and the accusations Stroop leveled against himself in his own words are appalling enough to require me to leave room for Stroop to speak with misguided self-aggrandizement.

It makes the modern Gaza genocide more starkly evil.

RETURN TO LATVIA, it's happening again and you're not paying attention

RETURN TO LATVIA
MARINA JARRE (tr. Ann Goldstein)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: ?

The Publisher Says: Building upon her celebrated autobiography Distant Fathers, Italian author Marina Jarre returns to her native Latvia for the first time since she left as a ten-year-old girl in 1935. In Return to Latvia—a masterful collage-like work that is part travelogue, part memoir, part ruminative essay—she looks for traces of her murdered father whom she never bid farewell. Jarre visits the former Jewish ghetto and the forest south of Riga where tens of thousands were slaughtered in a 1941 mass execution by Nazi death squads with active participation by Latvian collaborators. Here she attempts to reconcile herself with her past, or at least to heal the wounds of a truncated childhood.

Piecing together documents and memories, Return to Latvia explores immense guilt, repression and the complicity of Latvians in the massacres of their Jewish neighbors, highlighting vast Holocaust atrocities that occurred outside the confines of death camps in plain view.

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My Review: If you're Jewish and support this administration, you should realize how extremely delusional you are after you read this book. It does not start with Jews, not this time, but it won't stop before it gets to you.

Don't beleve me? Neither did the Jews who smiled smugly as "gypsys" and fegelehs and communists went to the camps.

Hate can not be satisfied. Hate cannot be appeased. Hate cannot be directed.

Stand up to it or be consumed by it.

There is no healing from hate. It deforms and disfigures and eats its fuel as certainly as their targets. It's the same bitter irony: To combat the thing, you must adopt the thing. Controlling evil, paradoxically, requires doing evil, thus scaring the haters into silence.

The lesson of history is the bitter, horrifying truth: Nothing can ever stop hatred. Scare haters into silence, and never, ever stop suspecting the grim, ugly truth is they're still there. Make it too expensive to their own lives to enact hatred like we are seeing roar back to life in the world today. The camps are real. The "news" is reporting on them and y'all aren't out in the streets...those who can be physically...calling attention to them. That is called "complicity".

Future Marina Jarres will write this story again, and again, and again, unless y'all pull your thumbs out and start doing the hard, icky work of combating hatred with hatred. It's ugly. It's unpleasant. But if you can read this story and not see how hugely much it costs not to do it...

...

...I've answered my own question. Signed, one your inaction has doomed to the camps unless I get lucky and die first.

MILENA AND MARGARETE: A Love Story in Ravensbrück, not often you see "love" and a concentration camp in the same sentence

MILENA AND MARGARETE: A Love Story in Ravensbrück
GWEN STRAUSS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A profoundly moving celebration of love under the darkest of circumstances

From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover, and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.

Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences, and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margarete wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”

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My Review: Any time anyone, anyone at all, asks, "why can't you just keep quiet about all that queer stuff?" show them this story.

Because people died for being themselves. And the survivors were too afraid to talk about it.

That's down to people, "nice" people, privileged people, simply not wanting to know that some girls like girls and some boys like boys. That culture of silence to avoid making the most privileged, spoiled brats among the world's most privileged, spoiled people...the most privileged the planet has ever produced!...just don't think they should ever have to think uncomfortable thoughts or consider other people's existence and freedom to be themselves as important.

"Alligator Alcatraz" is a concentration camp. If you think it isn't go look at the definition of one.

So think about this: your silence, your uninterest in speaking up for whatever selfish, personal reason, puts someone you know...me...at the very real risk of being treated like these two "passionate friends" (if you imagine there was a way to consummate their love in Ravensbrück, you're wrong). I'm not made of the tough, gritty stuff these women are, so....

We need to stand up to this ever-developing system. Talk about it on social media, post memes, do anything except nothing. Milena and Grete (as she is most often referred to) can't speak to us with their mouths. Author Strauss, in confronting the silence about queer people in Holocaust literature, is pointing the way to a fuller understanding of the Holocaust's horrors and evils, and the vileness of Stalin's mirror of it in the gulag system, as we see the steady slide back into a system that accepts this horror as normal.

It's not a particularly smooth pointing...it's narratively idea-driven, putting the small person's need for linear narratives behind following a thought to its conclusion. One person whose name we learn only to discover she dies, before we hear the rest of her anecdotal appearance, particularly stands out as an infelicity of organization. Another factor that led me to rate the book four stars was the sheer, numbing weight of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on the inmates. It happened; reasonable people know it happened; but because we are often far afield from Milena and Grete, the weight of horror often outweighs the burden of these two women's joyous discovery of love.

It does a fine job of personalizing the horrors of the Holocaust, but a less stellar job of making Milena and Grete come alive. I don't know that this is avoidable, given time and the destruction of records, but it was something I felt disappointment about.

Good writing and a truly underrepresented subject within Holocaust literature compensated me well: "I am using their beautiful love story to shine a light on sexuality in the camps and how it was seen, hidden, and the important role it played in survival, because to have found love in a concentration camp is extraordinary."

It absolutely is.

FRACTURE, Holocaust gay love affair & BEFORE ALL THE WORLD, gay Jew and his Black lover in Depression-era Philadelphia

BEFORE ALL THE WORLD
MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Picador's trade paper edition out 10 October 2023 for $19.00

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

Read Jean Hets's review here!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old.

"ikh gleyb nit az di gantze velt iz kheyshekh."
"I do not believe that all the world is darkness."

In the swirl of Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket’s, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, feygeles. Leyb is startled; fourteen years in amerike has taught him that his native tongue is not known beyond his people. And yet here is suave Charles—fingers stained with ink, an easy manner with the barkeep—a Black man from the Seventh Ward, a fellow traveler of Red Emma’s, speaking Jewish to a young man he will come to call Lion.

Lion is haunted by memories of life before, in Zatelsk, where everyone in his village, everyone except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl, and Leyb himself, was taken to the forest and killed.

Then, miraculously, Gittl is in Philadelphia, too, thanks to a poem she wrote and the intervention of a shadowy character known only as the Baroness of Philadelphia. And surrounding Gittl are malokhim, the spirits of her siblings.

Flowing and churning and seething with a glorious surge of language, carried along by questions of survival and hope and the possibility of a better world, Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s Before All the World lays bare the impossibility of escaping trauma, the necessity of believing in a better way ahead, and the power that comes from our responsibility to the future. It asks, in the voices of its angels, the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?

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My Review: I fear what I am about to say will doom a very fine read in too many of y'all's eyes: This isn't a standard-English-only novel. The characters sometimes speak Yiddish, sometimes speak as though mentally translating Yiddish into English on the fly, and all of it at the author's preferred energetic pace. The best I can say about those whose reading doesn't often stretch to variants of English is, there are very helpful footnotes.

Oh well. I had to say it despite the fact that most of y'all just clicked over to I Can Has Cheezburger? for a chuckle or two.

If you're still here, let me assure you that there's a lot to love about this story. Leyb/Lion, a gay Jew, is really and truly alive for me; his on-again, off-again love for the surprising Charles, a Black labor-organizing socialist-sympathizing Yiddish-speaking multihyphenate whose precarious identities are beautifully balanced. Their love story, to my gay eye vanishingly light on sex, is only one of the story's love stories. Gittl, a poet/seer of angels, is Leyb/Lion's nowsister who was presumed killed in a Red Army pogrom he avoided by being thrown out of Zatelsk for his faggoty ways. She shows up in Philadelphia, mirabile dictu, and is fêted by the middle-class Jewish community led by a soi-disant Baroness there as a harbinger of socialist paradise...despite almost dying at the hands of the "socialist" Soviets. This lionization ends when Gittl and Charles, um, well.

How this dissonant collection of adherents and believers and practitioners harmonizes their modes of being, their inner identities, and their actions is as one would expect: inconsistently and imperfectly and, all too often, inconsiderately. Every adult has learned to accept that others love in their own ways, or has been carted off to a safe place with lots of lovely pills to manage the aftermath of refusing the lesson. Leyb/Lion and Charles with their utterly amazing intersections of identity are, to no one's surprise, among the most wounded. Charles's belief in the socialist revolution survives the movement's apathy towards acknowledging the hideous harm caused by slavery, and its continuing horrors and cruelties. Leyb/Lion's gayness, well...Jews weren't mad for it then, though I understand there are more accepting branches of Judaism in modern times, and have no reluctance about letting him know he's less than, lower down in their esteem because of it. Gittl's a woman. What else needs be said, that fully explains the horrors she has and will endure before, during, and likely after amerike, philadelphiye, the doctor who slurmed out (of) his amerikanische, tooth jutting mouth the horrible, cruel orders to sedate her...are all in Life's past. It is this dissonance, however, that shaved a half-star off my rating. I wasn't as convinced as I thought the author expected me to be that these people would enact the steps they danced to. I was close to believing it for Gittl and less so for Leyb/Lion; Charles, the man made of and for Love, perhaps least of all. It wasn't an existential, "what are you even talking about?" level of dissonance but a quietly uneasy mental drumbeat of "...really...?" throughout the read.

“What will you do before all the world?”

That is the heart of the novel; that is the wisdom the reader is offered by the read. It's not clear to me that the characters *answer* this question. It is clear to me that they live in its words, that they think inside the whorls of that question mark and fall onto the finality of the period at its base.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FRACTURE
ELYSE HOFFMAN
Project 613 Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A heart-wrenching WW2 story of forbidden love and torn allegiances.

Franz Keidel is a monsterous SS soldier: loyal, hateful, and devoted to Hitler. With a cold heart, he hunts down his Führer’s enemies, but one fateful mission will fracture his shield of ice.

While hunting for Jews, Franz stumbles across a familiar face: Amos Auman, his childhood friend. Amos is the only source of joy in Franz’s life, but he is also a Jew. Unable to bring himself to kill his friend, Franz vows to protect Amos from his fellow Nazis.

As Franz spends more time with Amos, bringing him food and books, he falls in love with his kind-hearted friend. How could he fall in love with a man, a Jew? How can he continue to hate Jews when a Jew has thawed his icy heart?

And what will Franz do if he has to choose between Amos and his loyalty to Hitler? What choices does he have when he is already beyond redemption?

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My Review: I think a lot of us in the QUILTBAG community have forgotten, or at least not paid much attention to, the fact that Jews who were gay during the Nazi era were doubly endangered by their identities (where do y'all imagine the pink triangle symbol still widely used in our community came from if not a repurposing of a hate symbol?). It's simple, really, to focus on the six-million-dead mantra; there's no such count, either kept or kept alive in the public's awareness, for QUILTBAG or other victims of the eugenic nightmare of Nazi Germany and its eager hench-rats all over conquered Europe.

Amos is doubly blessed, then, as a gay Jew...two targets on his thin shoulders. Franz, abused and brutalized all childhood long, found such refuge as was possible with Amos and his family. But events conspire to separate the boys, as is usual in life. What counts for more with Franz than any memories of happiness is the community and sense of belonging that he finds in the hate-filled and -fueled ideological mob of brutes and bastards that replicate his abusive family...from the inside this time, as he gets to be the abuser instead of the abused.

Meeting fugitive Jew Amos again, knowing it's his friend Amos, and being in the position of power over Amos instead of dependent on him, his family, for such kindness as he ever knew, enables Franz to find a way through the maze of rage and pain he's carried inside for his whole life. He chooses, in a split second, a course of honor and love when he has accepted the course of hatred and violence that come naturally to him. To all humans, really. His decision to lie in order to save Amos's life is the crack in his armor that will lead him to accept the truth about himself and thus about his world. He loves Amos as a friend, he desires Amos as a lover, and he must then reject the lies and distortions he's been embracing as fundamental to his sense of himself to be the self who deserves Amos's return of love.

The first-kiss scene between the young men was very moving.

That might have made the inevitable ending more saddening, more painfully awfully real. One knows this can't, outside the realm of fairy tale, end in Happily Ever After. But the actual events are a gut-punch of reality after a honeymoon of discovery and love. (Side note: The Epilogue wasn't successful to me. It's a full-star deduction for silliness.)

But the four-star rating above should tell you what you need to know about my opinion of the story. It's a shame nothing made by human hands can be perfect, or at least not often, but perfect is the enemy of good. This is a good story told well. If it didn't actually, factually happen this way somewhere, I'll be surprised. And that ain't nothin' in my reading life.

HARRY HAFT: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano for Holocaust Remembrance Day

HARRY HAFT: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano
ALAN HAFT
Syracuse University Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Alan Scott Haft provides the first-hand testimony of his father, Harry Haft, a holocaust victim with a singular story of endurance, desperation, and unrequited love. Harry Haft was a sixteen-year-old Polish Jew when he entered a concentration camp in 1944. Forced to fight other Jews in bare-knuckle bouts for the perverse entertainment of SS officers, Harry quickly learned that his own survival depended on his ability to fight and win. Haft details the inhumanity of the "sport" in which he must perform in brutal contests for the officers. Ultimately escaping the camp, Haft's experience left him an embittered and pugnacious young man.

Determined to find freedom, Haft traveled to America and began a career as a professional boxer, quickly finding success using his sharp instincts and fierce confidence. In a historic battle, Haft fights in a match with Rocky Marciano, the future undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. Haft's boxing career takes him into the world of such boxing legends as Rocky Graziano, Roland La Starza, and Artie Levine, and he reveals new details about the rampant corruption at all levels of the sport.

In sharp contrast to Elie Wiesel's scholarly, pious protagonist in Night, Harry Haft is an embattled survivor, challenging the reader's capacity to understand suffering and find compassion for an antihero whose will to survive threatens his own humanity. Haft's account, at once dispassionate and deeply absorbing, is an extraordinary story and an invaluable contribution to Holocaust literature.

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My Review: I'm not the first person to pick up a boxing story. The violence and brutality inherent in the "sport" (which was used by ancient Greeks as military training) are, honestly, repulsive to me. I'm not famous for my delight in Holocaust stories, either.

What's going on here?

Stories like Pollak's Arm and The Vanished Collection feature the Jewish élite's fates, the kind of people who knew people whose names get into history books. Statistically not all the Jews in the Holocaust, dead or alive, could be those people; Hertzka Haft was a street kid, a hard-luck story from before there was a Holocaust, and whose survival was down to the fact that he could—and would—knock the ever-livin' snot out of other people to amuse and entertain his jailers.

There was nothing easy about Hertzka...Harry, in later life...Haft's life. He was the eighth and final child his mother bore...but she was so used to it she thought she was having gas pains, and *pow* Harry hit the floor under the tub of washing she was doing. His father died when he was three; his oldest siblings blamed him for infecting their mother with typhoid fever. His rock-tough self, and her with such rugged health, barely knew they had it; poor ol' papa passed beyond the veil from it in about a week.

Things really didn't get a lot easier from there on.

What I expect will shock readers is how...clear...Author Alan Haft, son of Harry, is. He doesn't linger over Dad's hurts. He doesn't shy away from the abuse Harry endured at the hands of his oldest brother, at the hands of the "christian" establishment, at the hands of the German invaders, the New York boxing establishment. He survived it all and didn't do it by being sweet, or intellectually pondering and systematizing the awful, painful stuff he's forced to endure simply for the privilege of continuing to breathe.

He was angry and he was strong and Harry Haft used those things as rocket fuel to extract his price for the sufferings he endured. Nothing, and I mean not one thing, stood between Harry and what he knew was his due. He hit people, and I don't mean polite punching like you see in sanitized boxing movies. I mean Alan Haft, clearly a good listener, understood that Harry never hit anyone without being extremely clear that 1) he had no choice but they'd see it coming and b) he was going to make sure that he got what was coming to him.

Given my uninterest in this sort of violence...ego-driven, honor-bound, these aren't ways to earn my sympathy...why am I rating this book so close to four stars? Because I think Harry Haft was the kind of man you'd want to know, to get in good with. Harry Haft suffered fools not at all, and those men are special friends who never once let your b.s. stand in the way, who never once fail you in a pinch. The Harry Hafts of the world love hard...an entire boxing career so he could be famous...not for fun, or even money, but so his lost Leah would hear about Harry Haft, see his photo, know to come find him.

That man, that force of nature, is getting a biopic tonight, this Holocaust Remembrance Day, on HBO Max. If it's among your channels, go look for The Survivor. I question that title. Given the horrors of his life inside the camps, did he survive? His body lived on. But...how much damage can a being endure, death, cannibalism, the unfathomably cruel suffering of existing in the Land of Plenty when so many didn't make it out? Is that "survival" in any meaningful way?

Alan Haft asks that question, not out loud, by exploring his psychotically angry, guilt-stewed, violent father's world. Interviews conducted before Harry Haft's death fifteen years ago probably saved both of their lives. How Alan Haft put together an identity is little short of a miracle, and how he dug around his own PTSD and located enough grace to offer his father this generous, honest, and deeply loving send-off is the reason you should read it, watch it, listen to the audiobook. The world's never been short of Harry Haft-like souls. We've got more incoming from the new wars.

Learning what happened will help you be that much better at reaching for their broken, abused hands instead of staring coldly, vacantly past them. Truth to tell, your world will get bigger and be better for it, like theirs.

POLLAK'S ARM, beautiful, maddening, horrifying, so very desperately sad

POLLAK'S ARM
HANS von TROTHA (tr. Elisabeth Lauffer)
New Vessel Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: October 16, 1943, inside the Vatican as darkness descends upon Rome. Having been alerted to the Nazi plan to round up the city’s Jewish population the next day, Monsignor F. dispatches an envoy to a nearby palazzo to bring Ludwig Pollak and his family to safety within the papal premises. But Pollak shows himself in no hurry to leave his home and accept the eleventh-hour offer of refuge. Pollak’s visitor is obliged to take a seat and listen as he recounts his life story: how he studied archaeology in Prague, his passion for Italy and Goethe, how he became a renowned antiquities dealer and advisor to great collectors like J. P. Morgan and the Austro-Hungarian emperor after his own Jewishness barred him from an academic career, and finally his spectacular discovery of the missing arm from the majestic ancient sculpture of Laocoön and his sons. Torn between hearing Pollak’s spellbinding tale and the urgent mission to save the archaeologist from certain annihilation, the Vatican’s anxious messenger presses him to make haste and depart. This stunning novel illuminates the chasm between civilization and barbarism by spotlighting a little-known figure devoted to knowledge and the power of artistic creation.

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My Review: First, read this:

Rome is so eerie these days. The city seems caught in the chokehold of some immense, capricious beast, especially at night. Pollak said the same thing, worded a little differently, but similar. A monster lying in wait, outwardly quiet, but ready to strike at any moment. Every monster strikes eventually. It's in its nature. Those of us harbored here in the Vatican feel a wave of gratitude and relief whenever we reach a building that the German embassy has marked as Vatican property. It's like a magic spell keeping the monster at bay. One may feel safe here.

In a nutshell, that's the book's burden of meaning. In this tightly paced read, you'll be subjected to a high level of frustration because it's just not possible not to be. These are Jews fleeing Nazis by hiding behind the Vatican's skirts. ... Talk about emotional whiplash.

The man narrating the book, K., to Monsignor F., is the one sent on the delicate, but very important for the Vatican, mission to see that Ludwig Pollak is brought to safety in the Vatican's boundaries. Pollak, a Jew, is about to be deported and, as we reading the book know from before we so much as blink, that means death for an elderly man, his diabetic wife, and his disabled progeny. K. is busily trying to instill in an elderly man who's been exiled from his Roman home before (for being an Austrian subject during World War I), who's lost his first wife during exile and been forced to serve an Emperor he had no slightest regard for, but who's been fêted and celebrated by that Emperor before and who now wants nothing to do with the Jew...there are simply too many miles on the clock, K. Pollak winds his hours down by emulating Sheherezade and using K.'s ears to pour his meaning into. After all, K. will survive and Pollak, well...the past means more to him:

One tends to think the weather was nicer and people were friendlier when remembering the past, and although it's not true, there is some truth to it. Every memory has its own truth; otherwise it wouldn't exist.

So we're going down the garden path with a man who's been mistreated many times, in many ways, for being a Jew. For being an Austrian in Italy, for being Czech in Austria, and a Jew to boot. This is a man whose life is Art. He's been ushered in ahead of Barons to the presence of J. Pierpont Morgan because he has, knows, can connect the dots...

What could possibly surpass the exhilaration a collector experiences after making a significant find or finally acquiring a piece he has long coveted and lost sleep over? This realm of terrific, silent joys has revealed itself to me as well, Pollak said; it may be the only joy that truly exists. Collectors, he continued, are the most passionate people on earth. People prepared to venture into the foulest corners of the criminal code to take possession of a teacup, a painting, or some other objet d'art.

And Morgan is not the first powerful man who has used Pollak's art-sense to make something extraordinary his own, or explain why what he has is extraordinary from Pollak's vast stores of knowledge. It is this quality of Pollak's mind that K. is called upon by the gods, via the peculiar institution of the Vatican, to witness. It is this extraordinary votary of Art who is, at long last, saying out loud why his life mattered and what he has done cannot be undervalued because of his Jewishness. It is there, in all its glory, the objet d'art and the sculptures and...and...and...it's physical. While Pollak as a name might vanish (not really, though not for lack of the world trying) his work remains:

Pleasant memories cannot exist, Pollak stated for no reason I could figure, if the experience itself wasn't pleasant. Or, he asked, can they? He didn't think so; he had written down everything important, or at least, everything that seemed important to him, because who knew what would prove important in the long run?

False modesty, or real, we the readers know that Pollak always knew what was always going to be important in the long run: Art. He was correct. This récit gets its title from a discovery Pollak made in the early 1900s, a piece of a sculpture made in Greece in times most ancient, and spoliated by the Empire's vast greed for Art and what were, even to them, antiquities.

from the Musei Vaticani

They {their arms} are not, however, extended in pride but in a fight against death, to fend off the snakes. Their death is certain. Whether one is fighting death or fighting certain death makes all the difference. Is it noble? Pollak asked. Naïve? Quiet? Grand? Or is it just terrible, plain and simple?

This is the sculpture in question. The right arm, the one bent at the elbow ever so slightly, is the one recovered by Pollak, and then donated to the Vatican Museum...he explains why in the text, but that is something you'll need to read for yourself, there's no way to excerpt it without typing many paragraphs. For this splendid act of generosity, he is awarded all sorts of attention and perks in the archeological community, and his (barely post-Dreyfus Affair) Jewishness is grandly overlooked as the crowned heads pin medals of merit all over him. The arm completes the emotional arc of the story of Laocoön as the gods mete out punishment for his unforgivable act of hubris. Read the story, I am not discussing it here.

When Pollak returned from his Austrian exile, he resumed his life-long career in service to the culture industry. His life spent as an art dealer, now spent being the director of a museum dedicated to sculpture, a collection assembled by an old friend of Pollak's. I don't imagine it will surprise you to know that there were vicissitudes...and betrayals...and that Pollak, in the end, cared less for any of that than he cared for the art, and for the stories inherent in caring for Art. The Vatican (for better or worse) has a very long memory. They sent K., a car, and their urgent invitation to Pollak and his family to accept rescue from certain death.

It's different in the Vatican, I quietly offered, and you know it. ... You will be safe there. And they're expecting you. I sleep very little, he said, barely at all now. It must be nice. How could I possibly wake them when the world they'd wake up to is the world they'd wake up to? I didn't know how to respond. We sat there in silence until he, rather than getting up and rousing his family, resumed his tale.

Despite the urgency, the despairing urgings of K., the certainty of death...is not troubling Pollak. He knows, from his connection to Laocoön, that the gods send what they will and it's not up to puny mortals to complain. He saw what was coming. He was, at sixty-plus years of age and in frail health, not going to argue with the gods again. Men, as he has bitter cause to know, are not creatures of reason. They are snakes, they are beings without character but with brute, brutal strength, when they serve their passions:

Not one of them wrote about what they saw; instead, they wrote about what they thought. And when a man thinks long enough about what he wants, it eventually becomes what he sees.

It is nothing but the truth, put in the mouth of Ludwig Pollak, guilty of the crime of Jewishness in a world where the powerful hate you for that unforgivable breach.

It is no accident that New Vessel Press chose this title to come out hard on the heels of The Vanished Collection. Fiction and non-fiction about spoliation. The parallels between Pollak and Jules Strauss, the parallels in our own times' spoliation crisis and restitution failings. There is so much to be said about the concept of "Museums" in today's world, the one where facing up to the past is at last becoming effective...and the immensity of the hate-stoking that is working against the deepening of the many, many overdue reckonings with the Imperial Past (not to mention present). The world is, sadly for some and confusingly for all, changing. The problem with resisting that change is it does not work. It merely stores energy to be released in the eventual great change. 1789 ring any bells?

We live in interesting times. Read this slender, one-sitting meditation on just how interesting, just how much there is still to be accounted for and dealt with. You will be glad you did.

THE VANISHED COLLECTION, a family's heritage raped away by Nazis

THE VANISHED COLLECTION
PAULINE BAER de PERIGNON (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press
$12.95 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five, for the message if not the messenger

The Publisher Says: It all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss: Renoir, Monet, Degas, Tiepolo and more. Pauline Baer de Perignon knew little to nothing about Strauss, or about his vanished, precious art collection. But the list drove her on a frenzied trail of research in the archives of the Louvre and the Dresden museums, through Gestapo records, and to consult with Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano.

What happened in 1942? And what became of the collection after Nazis seized her great-grandparents’ elegant Parisian apartment? The quest takes Pauline Baer de Perignon from the Occupation of France to the present day as she breaks the silence around the wrenching experiences her family never fully transmitted, and asks what art itself is capable of conveying over time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Well, this review went through some changes. A lot like me as I read this book. I think the world needs to attend to the huge, stinking pile of denial in the center of Culture Inc. What happened to the art collected by Jews? It was stolen by the Nazis. Those bad Nazis!

...and then what happened? *blank stare*

In Author Baer de Perignon's tale of family, legacies, and fairness denied, you will learn that the reality is...nothing happened. Museums bear extraordinary responsibility for the nothing that happened. They don't want to give their ill-got gains back to the families whose rightful property it is. The whole raison d'etre of "the Museum" (in its broadest cultural-institution sense) is thus opened to serious question.

This isn't a small issue. The 2003-2011 Iraq war resulted in *appalling* levels of art and antiquities being looted or damaged, often destroyed. There is some tut-tutting over this. Not a lot, given the scale and value of it. Why? Because that leads to lots of awkward questions about how "the Museum" got the stuff in the first place. "Provenance" and "spoliation" in other words. Then that opens lots of graves "the Museum" wants to leave closed.

This isn't the first time that this issue has been raised, or wrestled with. Read a book called Goldberg's Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade (it's excellent, BTW, highly recommend it to you). The topic simmers along, looted antiquities are topics of concern on slow news days around the world. For a minute. They don't rate high on most folks' outrage meters. But the Impressionists and Academicians and Old as well as other Masters aren't talked about in media or entertainment almost at all (pace George Clooney's lukewarm The Monuments Men, which did poorly at the box office). Because people love them, come to see them in their hallowèd homes, are inclined to buy tat with the (profitably licensed) images on them (from "the Museum"'s store). The fact that many were looted from Jews by the Nazis is bad. But whatcha gonna do.

Nothing, for as long as possible, until the heirs of the murdered millions forget (I was *astonished* at the number of people Author Baer de Perignon met who just knew nothing about what had been looted, spoliated, from their ancestors!) or give up. "The Museum" will still be there, after all, taking in cash from ill-got gains they should've given back most of a century ago.

It is a scandal but no one wants to bring up the solution: restore spoliated property to its proper owners, or otherwise their descendants. As I read this book, I realized the case for this is unassailable. But I realized also why I had such trouble writing this review: I dislike the author.

She's quite sarcastic, very judgemental, has a serious oh-poor-me attitude. She snarks, in the text, about people she fawns over in the Acknowledgments. One assumes she thinks these people won't read the actual book.... Her scattered, disorganized research method draws criticism she fobs off as passing...but I promise you that her "mentors" did the real heavy lifting. I read this between the lines, I recalled many author Acknowledgments from when I was an agent that left out lots of realities not to the Author's Taste. And I realized that I support the message of repatriation, restitution, and acknowledging the harm done to generations of people simply because they were Other...but I dislike this messenger.

It's a shallow, personal response, and it shouldn't prevent anyone from picking up this book for its message of ma'at, fairness, justice, and the value of saying "I'm sorry."

Postscript: Sotheby's has auctioned the painting the author worked so hard to reclaim. Watch her conversation with the auction house's staff. In the end, it brought $1.23 million hammer price.

BLACK IRISH BLUES, a follow-up to OUTERBOROUGH BLUES & WARSAW FURY, a WWII story we need Right NOW

BLACK IRISH BLUES: A Caesar Stiles Mystery
ANDREW COTTO
Black Rose Writing
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Black Irish Blues is the return-to-origin story of Caesar Stiles, an erstwhile runaway who returns to his hometown with plans to buy the town's only tavern and end his family's Sicilian curse.

Caesar's attempt for redemption is complicated by the spectral presence of his estranged father, reparation seekers related to his corrupt older brother, a charming crime boss and his enigmatic crew, and—most significantly—a stranger named Dinny Tuite whose disappearance under dubious circumstances immerses Caesar in a mystery that leads into the criminal underbelly of industrial New Jersey, the flawed myth of the American Dream, and his hometown's shameful secrets.

Black Irish Blues is a poetic, gritty noir full of dynamic characters, a page-turning plot, and the further development of a unique American character.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER AT THE AUTHOR'S REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: The first Caesar Stiles mystery, Outerborough Blues, was a big hit with me. I liked the atmospheric evocation of places I knew, at the times I knew them. I really enjoyed the writing Author Cotto clearly enjoyed writing...I hope that makes sense, I can't figure out how to fix it. Let me try this: When a writer can evoke a specific and precise feeling in me, attached to a specific and precise location in space and time, it comes across to me as that writer is sharing their own pleasure in that image, that moment.

It was too much to hope I'd get it again. I steeled myself as I opened the Kindle file. "It's not going to be the same, don't load that onto this book, it won't be as fresh as the first time," I gently self-talked myself off the ledge of inflated expectations.

"You know what my mother used to say about martinis?" I asked him.
...
We locked eyes until a small smile creased his face and he spoke in a bemused tone.

"No, no. Tell me. Wha'd your mother used to say about martinis?"

I put the knife down, wiped my hands and leaned into the bar, toward the man who needed to know the two Martinis rule.

"They're like boobs," I said. "One's not enough, but three are too many."

And just like *that* I'm right back in Caesar Stiles' world.

What happens next is the kind of thing that happens in the world of people like Caesar: running from, finding out they ran to instead; people don't know you, until they show you how well they got you pegged; a world that doesn't care about you until you find out how much they care what you do, and to whom. (And Foghat on the jukebox! Gawd...it was the 90s, all right.) But what makes this feel so familiar is also what makes the plot work. Get the tropes? Got the course.

Is that a good thing? It is in Author Cotto's hands. I like what he does with the way you're expecting something to happen, to come from a specific direction and involve some pretty familiar events...and that's what happens, only not the way you thought it would. The reason a trope (eg, the Irresistible Outsider Hero bagging all the sex) is an evergreen is that it works. It's not like one needs to challenge the evergreens to prove one's Talent. It's more like, "give 'em what they want but make it 60° off the straight lines."

This is what Author Cotto does with Caesar's story.

Helping out fellow-returnee Mike the local cop (home from LA) in solving the vanishing act pulled by Dinny, the unloved rich-guy Martini-story recipient; learning how Sallie, the dead brother from Outerborough Blues, continues to screw with his life; discovering good dirt on the long-vanished father he really didn't miss...all the noirness any committed reader of 'em could want. And delivered in the same compact form! Today's book-bloat has downsides, like heft and prolixity; it has upsides, like room to explore characters' motivations and present the world of the book; but best of all, in my opinion, is finding someone who can make Fat Elvis work in a few sentences without the bloat.

And here we are. Come for the atmosphere, stay for the story. And pray like hell that we get more Caesar in our lives.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WARSAW FURY: A WW2 Polish Resistance Novel Based on True Events
MICHAEL REIT
Kindle Original
$4.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Warsaw, 1939
We mustn't let darkness win.

Natan Borkowski has it all. In line to take over the successful family business, his future is set.

Julia Horowitz lives in poverty. The daughter of a shoemaker, she dreams of a different life—a different world.

Everything changes when Hitler’s armies invade Poland. Natan’s future is ripped away by the flick of a switch of a Luftwaffe pilot. When the smoke clears, Julia and her family find themselves locked within the walls of the newly-formed Jewish ghetto.

On opposite sides of the wall, Natan and Julia’s lives are not so different anymore. As the Nazis unleash a reign of hunger, terror, and death across the city, they must now decide what’s more terrifying:
To die on their knees, or go down fighting?

Based on true events, Warsaw Fury is a story of love, courage, and resilience in the face of unimaginable evil.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR, THE BOOK WHISPERER, AND NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: World War II and the Final Solution and German/Polish antisemitism. All the things I claim repel me like kryptonite does Superman, garlic does Dracula, and Old Spice does a metrosexual. What transreversal of my brain was enacted by which Doctor Who aliens, what cabal of soap-opera writers flipped my script, whose malign curse on me altered my tastes? None. All these tropes are in this thriller, and I still read it.

They all still do repel me, though.

So how did that rating appear up there, the one that doesn't have a minus sign in front of it, the one that's above three but below five? Perspective. Not just mine, the story's as well. I'm down for a story whose *background* is WWII, but whose events while factual and tied to WWII, are not using WWII as the reason for the story.

Natan is a rich kid, a guy with social skills and connections; Julia is not possessed of either of those things; what brings the two of them together in this story is how they each hate and fear the Germans who have invaded their country and are murdering their people. Both lost their parents, each has a wise (if young) head and a fierce heart to avenge those who are unjustly dead. The whole story isn't about the brutal regime trying to exterminate all the Poles, every Jew, anyone who isn't Just Like Them.

We are instead told the two interlinked tales of resourceful young people motivated by a catastrophe they never asked for and weren't consulted about doing every single dangerous, difficult, and deeply necessary thing to stop, reverse, and fix their world. The planet needs them, or their great-grandchildren, now. These two characters, people on either side of a literal and metaphorical wall, are united in their purpose to resist, to expel, the invaders wreaking graphically told havoc on their home. They unite despite their "differences" because the goal they serve is more important than the surface dissimilarities that actually make each well-suited to their respective roles. And, because of course they did, these two crazy kids fell in luuuv. Despite their wildly different backgrounds, though, at least this couple could never possibly lack for something to talk about....

The story doesn't belabor the points I'm calling out here. I am doing so. I am explaining how, despite being a story told in a setting I'm ever so sick of, I got involved in and inspired by Warsaw Fury. Author Reit clearly knows his subject inside out, which adds to the pace of action he achieves and sustains. There is never a lack of action, and it's all grounded in real events.

So that's the story. What about the writing? Well, what indeed. It is unexceptional but unexceptionable. It isn't stellar and it isn't execrable. It is the high end of serviceable, the lower edge of inspired. Occasional phrases made me cringe...a Varsovian, a Pole, and you'd fight to the bitter end, oh now really...but it got the job done.

You're looking at that rating right now, aren't you. Thinking about the times I've said much harsher things about much milder stylistic infractions. You know, you're correct, but you're also looking at this from the ordinary perspective. This is an extraordinary case. I gave a book whose writing I reluctantly allowed to happen to me four full stars...doesn't that say something a lot bigger than "read these pretty sentences" would?

We need this story of coming together to resist an overwhelming, unstoppable crisis. We need to read things that stress our only hope being to find the good intentions and best practices in those we'd normally never so much as fire a neuron for. This story, a fact-based one, tells us that when we're pulling in the same direction, we can move the damn Nazis and their weapons on down the road.

Uncurl your lip, Sunshine. Get the memo here: Fight now, fight hard and with all your power...but aim it where it will help not where you think you want to.

I, PIERRE SEEL, DEPORTED HOMOSEXUAL: A Memoir of Nazi Terror...more important now than ever

I, PIERRE SEEL, DEPORTED HOMOSEXUAL: A Memoir of Nazi Terror
PIERRE SEEL (tr. Joachim Neugroschel)
Basic Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: At the age of seventeen, in the arms of a thief, Pierre Seel felt his watch sliding off his wrist. So begins the astonishing chain of events that led to the Schirmeck-Vorbruch concentration camp, where Seel suffered unspeakable horrors for the sole "crime" of being a homosexual.

The story of survival in the camps has been told many times, but Seel's is one of the only firsthand accounts of the Nazi roundup and deportation of homosexuals. For nearly forty years he kept his experiences—including torture, humiliation, and witnessing the vicious murder of his lover at the hands of the Nazis—a secret in order to cover up his homosexuality.

He found a wife through a personal ad, married, and raised three children. "The Liberation", he writes, "was for others". Finally, haunted by his experiences and by the silence of others, he decided to bear witness to an aspect of the Holocaust rarely seen. As he noted, "If I do not speak, I will become the accomplice of my torturers". The result is a terrifying and heartbreaking memoir, extraordinary for its frankness and courage.

My Review: First, read this:

I had to bear witness in order to protect the future, bear witness in order to overcome the amnesia of my contemporaries.
–and–
If I do not speak, I will become the accomplice of my torturers.

Horrible what Hate does to people, makes them bestial and vicious and base. Seel saw all of that, from his entry into the list of homosexuals kept by police to his arrest and deportation. Gay people in concentration camps were not accepted and cared for as were other prisoners, they were victimized by the others as well as the guards. Of course French society at that time was no more accepting of queers than it has ever been...even though the Vichy government wasn't legally re-criminalizing sodomy between consenting adults, it felt free to persecute its QUILTBAG citizens without even that figleaf.

What is it that you hate so much, straight people? Christian, Jewish, Muslim people? What in your souls says "I hate" so loudly that even your big bully imaginary friend hates too?

He had been one of the officials who kept the illegal list of homosexuals in that region with the same good conscience as when he ticketed store owners for neglecting dog turds on their sidewalks.

Imagine this...the *entire*reason* Pierre had to endure the horrors he was forced to undergo was one simple act of responsible citizeship, of simple human need: He lost a watch to a trick (who obviously didn't trade names with him!) and reported it to the police station. He was young and naïve, answered the police's questions honestly, and was ever after branded a homosexual...an undesirable. Well, anyway, after an amazing wartime changeup and a forced conversion to straightness in the 1950s, Seel finally came to peace with himself in 1981 and, in 1994, finally wrote down the painful facts of his past. Inspired by this review getting blogged, I decided that I'd like to know some more about Seel's post-memoir life. I was appalled to learn that the Mayor of Strasbourg, from whence he was deported, actually refused to shake his hand because of his effrontery in telling his own story. That same person later went on to national office under a Socialist government...so much for Leftists having good credentials with QUILTBAG folks.

Better than that revolting little contretemps, however, was the throw-away line, "He spent the last 12 years or so with his long-term partner, Eric Féliu, with whom he bred dogs in Toulouse, which helped him to overcome the fear of dogs he had developed after Jo's death," referring to his lover torn apart by guard dogs on the Russian Front in 1943. I myownself would recommend reading the Wikipedia entry after the book...I'd especially like to see the book have an Afterword or Epilogue in place of the somewhat bloviating Introduction it has now. Eric Féliu is someone I'd like to know a whole lot more about. (The Endnotes aren't very well organized, either, and Basic Books is one of the acknowledged leaders in non-fiction publishing. It's a shame, really.)

It's not easy to read, but I wish I could make every religious person and every anti-gay bigot read it. I can't, so there's no point in going on about it. If something in you thinks that it's okay to say "sure, fine, be that way but ewww don't talk about it" then you're the reason books like this are necessary.

FOUR PERFECT PEBBLES, a timely (when isn't it timely?) reminder of the horrors of populism

FOUR PERFECT PEBBLES
LILA PERL (tr. Marion Blumenthal Lazan)
Greenwillow Books
$16.99 hardcover edition, $6.99 paperback edition, $1.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s unforgettable and acclaimed memoir recalls the devastating years that shaped her childhood. Following Hitler’s rise to power, the Blumenthal family—father, mother, Marion, and her brother, Albert—were trapped in Nazi Germany. They managed eventually to get to Holland, but soon thereafter it was occupied by the Nazis. For the next six and a half years the Blumenthals were forced to live in refugee, transit, and prison camps, including Westerbork in Holland and Bergen-Belsen in Germany, before finally making it to the United States. Their story is one of horror and hardship, but it is also a story of courage, hope, and the will to survive.

Four Perfect Pebbles features forty archival photographs, including several new to this edition, an epilogue, a bibliography, a map, a reading group guide, an index, and a new afterword by the author. First published in 1996, the book was an ALA Notable Book, an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, and IRA Young Adults’ Choice, and a Notable Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, and the recipient of many other honors.

My Review: In the annals of man's cruelty to man, the Holocaust stands out for its sheer, industrial-scale coldness and horror. There is ample literature attesting to the awfulness of being condemned to death for the mere accident of being born to a Jewish parent. This book, another entry into that crowded segment, is aimed at young readers.

I don't know that any book about the Holocaust is something I want young readers to read. It's too huge and too vile a topic to make me feel comfortable introducing it to those whose lives are still in the vulnerable and bendable stage. I wouldn't let my child read this book, far better she should read the Marquis de Sade than this kind of material.

But the world disagrees with me. So I am renewedly glad that I have no young children. But I think this story is one that makes the idea of the Holocaust, its especial and unique evil in human history, more painfully poignantly real than any other literary work I've ever seen: This is the story of a child who went through the system with her family intact, until the bitter horrifying end of the tale. This is what the horrible, vile, evil, disgusting Germans wanted to destroy: A little girl, her mama, her papa, and her big brother.

Because they were Jews.

Now look at the humanitarian crises of economic and war refugees being towed out to see and left by the Greek Government; the tide of Islamophobia wracking European countries; the perennial racism and populism of the US against Hispanic and native-born Black people; the Othering of every Asian minority because of a disease that was first detected in China; and tell me that this book is no longer relevant. Has nothing to say to you, your concerns, is old-fashioned.

It isn't.