Howard Jacobson0.0 Life should have been sunny for Max Glickman, growing up in Crumpsall Park in peacetime, with his mother's glamorous card evenings to look forward to, and photographs of his father's favourite boxers on the walls. But other voices whisper seductively to him of Buchenwald, extermination, and the impossibility of forgetting. Fixated on the crimes which have been committed against his people, but unable to live among them, Max moves away, marries out, and draws cartoon histories of Jewish suffering in which no one, least of all the Jews, is much interested. But it's a life. Or it seems a life until Max's long-disregarded childhood friend, Manny Washinsky, is released from prison. Little by little, as he picks up his old connection with Manny, trying to understand the circumstances in which he made a Buchenwald of his own home, Max is drawn into Manny's family history - above all his brother's tragic love affair with a girl who is half German. But more than that, he is drawn back into the Holocaust obsessions from which he realises there can be, and should be, no release. There is wild, angry, even uproarious laughter in this novel, but it is laughter on the edge. It is the comedy of cataclysm.
Ирен Немировски4.2 Жаркое лето 1940 года, во Францию вторглись немецкие войска. По дорогам войны под бомбами катится лавина отчаявшихся, насмерть перепуганных людей: брошенные любовниками кокотки, изнеженные буржуа, бедняки, калеки, старики, дети. В толпе беженцев сплавилось всё - сострадание и подлость, мужество и страх, самоотверженность и жестокость. Как и всей Франции, городку Бюсси трудно смириться с тем, что он стал пристанищем для оккупантов...
Роман знаменитой французской писательницы Ирен Немировски (1903-1942), погибшей в Освенциме, безжалостно обнажает психологию людей во время вражеского нашествия, воскрешает трагическую страницу французской истории.
Ирен Немировски родилась в Киеве в 1903 году и вместе с семьей эмигрировала во Францию, когда ей было 15 лет. Литературный успех пришел к Ирен в конце двадцатых годов. Спасаясь от немецкого нашествия, она бежала из Парижа и поселилась в глухой деревушке, но была арестована и погибла в Освенциме в 1942 году.
Ее дочь Дениза Эпштейн сохранила рукопись последнего произведения матери, романа "Французская сюита", в котором трагическое бегство французов в июне 1940 года описано с потрясающей силой. Роман увидел свет в 2004 году и имел оглушительный успех. Он удостоен литературной премии Ренодо, что стало уникальным событием, поскольку эта премия, как и Нобелевская, дается только здравствующим авторам.
Кармен Каллил0.0 "Bad Faith "tells the story of one of history's most despicable villains and con men--Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and "Commissioner for Jewish Affairs," who managed the Vichy government's dirty work, "controlling" its Jewish population.
Though he is one of the less remembered figures of the Vichy government, Darquier (the aristocratic "de Pellepoix" was appropriated) was one of its most hideously effective officials. Already a notorious Nazi-supported rabble-rouser when he was appointed commissioner, he set about to eliminate the Jews with particularly brutal efficiency. Darquier was in charge of the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up in Paris in which nearly 13,000 Jews were dispatched to death camps. Most of the French who died in Auschwitz were sent there during his tenure. Almost all of the 11,400 French children sent to Auschwitz--the majority of whom did not survive--were deported in his time. In all, he delivered 75,000 French to the Nazis and, at the same time, accelerated the confiscation of Jewish property, which he then used for his own financial gain. Never brought to justice, he lived out his life comfortably in Spain, denying his involvement in the Holocaust until his last days.
Where did Louis Darquier come from? How did this man--a chronic fantasist and hypocrite, gambler and cheat--come to control the fates of thousands? What made him what he was? These are the questions at the center of this extraordinary book. In answering them, Carmen Callil gives us a superlatively detailed and revealing tapestry of individuals and ideologies, of small lives and great events, the forces of government and of personalities--in France and across the European continent--that made Vichy possible, and turned Darquier into its "dark essence."
A tour de force of memory, accountability, and acknowledgment, "Bad Faith" is a brilliant meld of grand inquisitive sweep and delicate psychological insight, a story of how past choices and actions echo down to the present day, and an invaluable addition to the literature and history of the Holocaust.
Adam LeBor0.0 The millennia-old port of Jaffa, now part of Tel Aviv, was once known as the "Bride of Palestine," one of the truly cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean. There Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived, worked, and celebrated together—and it was commonplace for the Arabs of Jaffa to attend a wedding at the house of the Jewish Chelouche family or for Jews and Arabs to both gather at the Jewish spice shop Tiv and the Arab Khamis Abulafia's twenty-four-hour bakery. Through intimate personal interviews and generations-old memoirs, letters, and diaries, Adam LeBor gives us a crucial look at the human lives behind the headlines—and a vivid narrative of cataclysmic change.
