cover image NOTHING MAKES YOU FREE: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

NOTHING MAKES YOU FREE: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

, . . Norton, $27.95 (394pp) ISBN 978-0-393-05046-2

"He isn't flying," a young boy explains about a picture he has drawn, "he's hanging. See, he's dead, his tongue is blue.... My father is there, too. Here, he is the one with the big ears." This anthology's memories and fictions contain many more moments that move and shock us. "The Second Generation will never know what the First Generation does in its bones, but what the Second Generation knows better than anyone else is the First Generation," writes Bukiet (Strange Fire), and these 30 pieces (including translations from the Hebrew, Swedish, German, French, Serbian, Dutch, Hungarian and Italian) cover a wide range of topics and emotions. In "Animal" (from Nightfather), Carl Friedman's father confesses that he wants the camp kapo he murdered to come back from the dead so that he can kill him again, but more slowly. In Sonia Pilcer's "Do You Deserve to Live," the author combines reflections on her survivor mother, her own work on a movie fan magazine and musings about Liz Taylor's conversion to Judaism in order to marry Eddie Fisher to generate original insights into the complexities of the survivor experience. The writing here is uniformly strong, intelligent and at times dazzling: Gila Lustiger's excerpt from The Inventory is a model of concise emotional story-telling, and Mihaly Kornis's short "Petition" (a sarcastic play on a legal document detailing the kind of life desired) is a wonderful conceit brilliantly executed. While some of the pieces are by noted writers such as Eva Hoffman, Art Spiegelman and Alan Kaufman, many names here will be new to readers, and the mixture of fiction and more traditional memoir is fresh as well. (Apr.)