"Extraordinary...Rich in irony and regret...[the] people and settings are vividly realized and his prose [is] compelling in its simplicity."
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
As the world slips into the throes of war in 1939, young Maciek's once closetted existence outside Warsaw is no more. When Warsaw falls, Maciek escapes with his aunt Tania. Together they endure the war, running, hiding, changing their names, forging documents to secure their temporary lives—as the insistent drum of the Nazi march moves ever closer to them and to their secret wartime lies.
From the Paperback edition.
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Louis Begley lives in New York City. His previous novels are The Man Who Was Late, As Max Saw It, About Schimdt, Mistler's Exit, Schmidt Delivered, and Shipwreck.
The teller of this tale reveres the Aeneid because "that is where he first found civil expression for his own shame at being alive, skin intact and virgin of tattoo, when his kinsmen and almost all the others, so many surely more deserving than he, perished in the conflagration." Indeed, this seems a very real attempt on the part of the author to expurgate, or at least come to terms with, a sense of guilt that has haunted him throughout his life and to reflect on the lingering impact of evil on individual lives. Survival in wartime often requires compromise, but for a young Jewish boy and his aunt, survival in wartime Poland requires a total suspension of identity. It is the ultimate act of theater, requiring a careful and constant denial of one's heritage. For the child, the tragedy is that suspension becomes loss: "He became an embarrassment and slowly died. A man who bears one of the names Maciek used has replaced him. . . . Our man has no childhood he can bear to remember." A moving addition to Holocaust literature and one well recommended.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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