Introverted Reader

Meeting a Survivor: Baruch G. Goldstein

Last September, I decided to go to the Decatur Book Festival outside Atlanta for the first time. It sounded like a huge festival and there was bound to be an author I like there, right? I printed out the schedule at home and then sat down to decide who I was going to see when. I saw Diana Gabaldon, Ridley Pearson, Brandon Sanderson, Karen White, Joshilyn Jackson, Susan Rebecca White, Christina Diaz Gonzalez, and many more. Out of all of these, the person that I was the most excited to see was someone that I had never even heard of. His name is Baruch G. Goldstein and he is a Holocaust survivor. His book is For Decades I Was Silent: A Holocaust Survivor's Journey Back to Faith. Let me explain something first. We aren't really all that diverse where I live. Oh, Asheville itself is getting there, but outside the city limits? We're mostly Scotch-Irish Protestants. Needless to say, I have never met a Holocaust survivor before. Rabbi Goldstein was the last author I planned to see. He was speaking in one of Decatur's churches. It was packed. I would guess there were between 150-200 people there to see him. He was a phenomenal speaker. He laid his heart out before us, desperate to have us truly hear his story. (Forgive me if this is choppy. I have a hard time making posts about meeting people flow nicely, plus I'm writing from notes I took 6 months ago.) Rabbi Goldstein said that we aren't learning enough from history. We keep waging wars. He's not a pacifist, but wars need to stop. We've done so many great things, we can do this as well. Why are we so smart yet so full of hate? In 1939, there were five people in…

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May 8, 2011

Read more about the article Movie Review: <i>Life is Beautiful</i>

Screen and Stage Review

Movie Review: Life is Beautiful

A charming, fast-talking Italian man tries to win the heart of his "principessa." A few years later, he uses his boundless imagination to protect his young son from the realities of life in a concentration camp. I absolutely loved this movie. I'm not a huge movie buff, tending to fall asleep about halfway through almost everything, so it really means something for me to say that. Don't get me wrong, I do like movies, but I rarely love them. The first part of this lovely movie is like a fairy tale. Guido (Roberto Benigni) meets and falls in love with beautiful Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), who is already engaged to another man. Guido is so charming and funny that she finds it almost impossible to resist him. I did find it impossible to resist him. Benigni's performance is spectacular. He is excellent with the physical comedy that had me laughing continuously throughout this part of the movie. My husband very rarely laughs until he can't breathe, but he got to that point a few times throughout this first part. My favorite scene might have been the section where Guido jokingly uses his own skinny little body to extol the virtues of the Italian people. My poor husband has had to endure me singing the praises of his Cuban belly button in Guido-style ever since. A few years later, Guido is still a happy-go-lucky prankster, but times have changed. Soldiers are everywhere. As a Jew, authorities are keeping a very close eye on him. Then one day, he, his elderly uncle, and his young son are rounded up on a cattle train. We all know what that means. My heart started to hurt. I had fallen in love with this character. I didn't know if I could keep watching. But Guido sets…

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May 7, 2011

Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman: Book Review

This is the continuation of the true story of Vladek Spiegelman's survival as a Jew in WWII Poland. Most of what I wrote in my review of Maus I still stands, but there’s a bit more of the author’s feelings included. You can see the catharsis he’s going through as he writes this novel. He’s painfully honest about the conflicting feelings he has toward his father and his mother. Again, most of Vladek’s survival relied on luck, but I was left in awe of his ingenuity and his talent for survival. But the man would drive me crazy. I was left wondering if he was the way he was because of what he went through or if he was just born that way. This book touches on prejudices we still have today, even people who should know better. I have to admit that I was welling up before I had read one word of the story--and I'm not a crier. Maus I and Maus II are just such powerful books. Still highly, highly recommended. Reviewed August 14, 2009 Read an excerpt. Buy Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began at Malaprop’s | Better World Books I have an affiliate relationship with Malaprop's, my local independent bookstore, and Better World Books. I will receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase books through links on my site.

Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman: Book Review

Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, was a Jew living in Poland in WWII. He made it through, and Maus I is Spiegelman’s story of his father’s life, as well as an exploration of the way the lives of the survivors and their family members were never the same. Okay, let’s look at the fact that this is a graphic novel first. It absolutely works. The Jews are mice, the Germans are cats, the French are frogs--you get the idea. This is a young adult book, so I think that helps kids/teens deal with the story a little better. A skeletal mouse is alarming enough, but it would be so much harder for a child to deal with if it had been a photo of a skeletal person. As an adult who knows something about what happened, I found that the form made me see with new eyes. We’ve all seen “Schindler’s List” or read one of the books written by survivors. But this form somehow hit me a little harder, almost as if I were learning about the Holocaust for the first time. It still stays true to the horror and atrocity. Some of it is sort of passed over, but the moments when the violence is shown stand out that much more. I’ve read quite a few Holocaust novels, but the moments of random violence in Maus I hit me hard. Spiegelman took the “less is more” approach and it worked. There were so many things I liked about this book. The historical part of the story opens with Vladek as a reasonably prosperous young mouse marrying into a wealthy family. I liked that this is where it started. I got to see how everything was slowly stripped away until they were desperate for any shelter and any food. That…

Introverted Reader Features

Character Connection: Elizabeth McKenna

Don’t you just love larger-than-life characters? The ones who jump off the page and grab you? Whether you love them or hate them, you can’t be indifferent to them. I would love to know about the characters who just won’t leave you! Most of you will probably post about how much you love (or loathe) each character, but this is a great place for the more creative ones among you to let go and have fun! Write yourself into a scene with Anne and Diana. Write a love poem in elvish for Aragorn. Draw a picture of Harry obliterating Voldemort. The possibilities are endless. Be sure to post the book's title and author, and be very careful not to give away spoilers while talking about how much you love your characters. Mr. Linky will be posted here on The Introverted Reader every Thursday.Elizabeth McKenna is not physically present in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrow, nevertheless she is the heart of the story. Elizabeth has a talent for drawing people to her. They might normally be loners, but no one can resist her charm. She is the one who stuck a disparate group of people with such an awful name for a society. After an illegal pig roast on the German-occupied island of Guernsey during WWII, the partakers were on their way home after curfew. They knew they were in trouble when a group of German soldiers stopped them. Quick-thinking Elizabeth concocted a story about how they were just leaving a society meeting. They were allowed to safely go on their way with a warning. She knew that the Germans might start watching them to see if there really was a society, so she brought the society into being. Very few…

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May 5, 2011

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi: Book Review

Primo Levi was a young Jewish man living in Turin, Italy when he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Due to a combination of luck and calculation, he survived. I truly, truly hate to give any Holocaust memoir less than five stars. They are all important and they should all be read. That said. Somehow I never got drawn into this book. It took me two weeks to read a book that is 190 pages long. Crazy, right? I can't put my finger on what my problem was. Bear with me as I try to work it out. Maybe it's that I'm more of the "feeling" personality type and Levi seems to be more of a "thinker." He does have some very astute observations to make about humanity. I started to lose interest in a chapter titled "The Drowned and the Saved." This chapter was almost like a primer for how to survive in such horrific conditions. I have concluded that I wouldn't make it. I don't understand anything that resembles economics. So descriptions of schemes to trade 1 piece of bread for a coupon that somehow turns into 4 pieces of bread left me scratching my head. I don't get it. My eyes glazed over. I did finally get more interested in the very last chapter, "The Story of Ten Days." This felt more personal to me. Levi and some fellow prisoners are trying to survive in the abandoned camp until the Russian army arrives. They immediately lose the "survival at all costs" mentality and start to look out for each other again. In looking back through this book for my review, I see a lot of passages that seem pertinent and that provide a lot of food for thought. Maybe this was just a bad time for me…

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry: Book Review

Annemarie Johansen is a 10-year-old girl growing up in Denmark during WWII. Soldiers occupy every street corner and everyone does his or her best not to draw attention to themselves. Annemarie's best friend, Ellen, is a Jew. One night, Annemarie's family hides Ellen from soldiers who are looking for Jews. How far is the family willing to go to provide that protection? How brave can they be? I don't know how I didn't ever read this in school. Well, I guess I do now that I looked at the copyright date. :( Published in 1989, I was probably a little too old for it by the time it truly came to the attention of teachers. Anyway, I would probably have liked this just a bit more had I read it when I was younger. I do read YA and MG books, but I gravitate toward fantasy. I don't always fully appreciate the realistic books. I have to say that I did like this, even coming to it late. I can see how it makes a good introduction to the Holocaust for younger readers. There's plenty of fear but very little violence. The fear is even vague. No one is talking about camps or ovens. I like that everyone involved is just an ordinary person. When so many of our "heroes" today are lionized to the point of seeming to be superhuman, it's nice to be reminded that true heroes are ordinary people doing their best in extraordinary circumstances. That gives everyone room to be a hero. One thing I did like, and I'm sure kids relate to, is that Annemarie gets to play her own heroic part. She is scared and she questions her own bravery, but her family entrusts her with a big responsibility when it becomes obvious that…

The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman: Book Review

Jan and Antonina Żabiński were the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo when Germany invaded Poland. Between the bombing, Nazi cruelty, and the Nazi desire to keep all of the rare animals for themselves, there quickly wasn't much of a zoo to keep. But Jan was an ingenious thinker and he came up with various ideas to keep the zoo complex under his care. From community gardens to a pig farm to a fur farm, he always had the zoo under his control. He was deeply involved in the Polish Underground, and as part of his efforts, he moved hundreds of Jews through his zoo on the way to safer ground. This wasn't exactly what I was expecting, and that was both good and bad. Generally coming at WWII through the Holocaust, I mainly think of Poland as the home of Auschwitz and the worst of the concentration camps. That's as far as I take it. I've never given any thought to the fact that Germany invaded Poland first and kept the Poles brutally repressed throughout the duration. Diane Ackerman showed me how bad it was for the Poles. My problem was that I expected more of a narrative about life in the zoo, but the story was all over the place. There was actually very little about the zoo and the Jews in hiding there. A few who stayed for a while were written about, but that was about it. The rest of it bounced around a lot. There was a constant thread about the Żabiński family and how they made it through the war. But then there would be paragraphs about girl couriers helping the Underground, a pediatrician who refused to escape because he didn't want to leave the children in his orphanage, random people in the Underground and…

Introverted Reader Features

Welcome to Holocaust Remembrance Week

<a href="https://introvertedreader.com/2011/05/welcome-to-holocaust-remembrance-week.html"><img border="0" src="https://introvertedreader.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/HolocaustRemembrance3-6.jpg" width="200"></a> I am not Jewish. I'm not saying that's good or bad. That's just how it is. The Holocaust will never be as personal for me as it is for others whose families suffered and survived. Yet here I am, hosting Holocaust Remembrance Week on my blog, because I feel that it is important for all of us to remember what the world lost in a horrific war about 70 years ago. The numbers of survivors and witnesses are dwindling now, so it's all the more important that those of us who came after carry on remembering and doing our best to make sure that we never let something like that happen again. My grandfather was in the European theater during WWII. As far as I know, he never spoke about what he saw over there. I don't even know if he encountered any camps or if he only saw armies fighting. Again, that's not good or bad, that's just the way that he dealt with it. It was a different generation. They didn't talk things out. They buried them and did their best to move on. My grandfather passed away 18 years ago, taking all those memories with him, never to be shared with anyone. I'm sure there are so many survivors and soldiers and civilians who were like him. It was easier to try to leave behind what they lived through and saw. That's why it's important that we read and watch and listen to those who did share their experiences. Most of us can't conceive of the horrors of the Holocaust. It's impossible to even wrap our minds around the numbers involved. Six million lives lost. The number is so big, it's meaningless. Yet we must make meaning out of it. By focusing…

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May 1, 2011

Instructions by Neil Gaiman: Book Review

This is Neil Gaiman's poem, "Instructions" bound as a picture book and illustrated by Charles Vess. I love this. I have to admit that when I first came across Gaiman's poem in Fragile Things, I read it, thought it was pretty cool, and moved on, both in the book and in my head. It wasn't until I met Charles Vess at a book signing for Drawing Down the Moon and he told us about this project that I really got excited about the whole thing. He had prints of his artwork for us to look at. As I flipped through them, I knew this was going to be something special. And it is. Basically instructions for surviving a fairy tale, Gaiman weaves many themes into this short-ish poem. Help who you can. Don't trust those who seem untrustworthy. Trust yourself. Come home at the end. And suddenly you realize that he could be (is?) talking about how to live your life well. And you are reminded again what a master Gaiman is. As for the illustrations--perfection. I love Vess's artwork. It has such a perfect fairy tale feel to it. And when you sit down to really look at just one of these illustrations, you are blown away by the amount of subtle detail worked in. I highly, highly recommend this. Children will love it, and so will readers of any age who understand that the truest advice can be found in "children's books." Find author Neil Gaiman on his website for young readers, his blog, Twitter, and Facebook. Buy Instructions at Malaprop’s | Better World Books I have an affiliate relationship with Malaprop's, my local independent bookstore, and Better World Books. I will receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase books through links on…