Pieta

Klein, a Hungarian-born biologist, Holocaust survivor and naturalized Swede, is a wonderfully lucid essayist who enlarges our capacity to think and feel. In the title piece, a profound meditation on suffering and compassion, he visits Hiroshima and Nietzsche's bedroom, meets beggars on Bombay's sidewalks and recalls his wartime job on the Jewish Council in Budapest as the Nazi crematoria blazed. Elsewhere he portrays Rudolf Vrba, who miraculously escaped from Auschwitz, and Simon Srebnik, a Pole who survived the Nazis by singing ballads on their riverboats. Two essays deal with suicides: those of Attila Jozsef, Hungarian proletarian poet and national hero, and of Klein's cousin Pista, whose death left the author with a lifelong sense of guilt. Klein also reflects on biological individuality and tissue transplantation, makes a moving confession on the burdens of growing up fatherless and reports on a global AIDS congress, in which he scrutinizes potential therapeutic avenues and ponders our culture's inability to deal with the deadly reality of the epidemic. (July)