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Loading... Not Me: A Novel (edition 2007)by Michael Lavigne (Author)
Work InformationNot Me by Michael Lavigne
  
None No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) skipstern | Jul 11, 2021 |   ) suesbooks | Aug 26, 2018 | This was an interesting, well told story with just a few minor problems. For one thing, there were a few areas in the story where the author seems to get intentionally crude. These parts took me out of the story because there didn't seem to be a good reason for their inclusion. For another, the mystery of his family's history is only partially resolved at the end. After all the investigating and angst, there is no big "AHA!" moment. But this book does do something that many others fail at -- offering a different take on the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Three and a half stars. ( ) dorie.craig | Jun 22, 2017 | The story is of Heschel Rosenhem, a survivor of the Majdenek concentration camp during WWII, who is elderly and now in a nursing home in Florida where he is mentally declining due to Alzheimer's disease. His son Michael comes into possession of a journal of his dad's which was written during the war years. Michael is divorced, far away from his ex-wife Ella in San Francisco, and conflicted about his relationship with his own son Josh who lives with Ella. Michael slowly reads his dad's journal while visiting him in Florida and is horrified by what he learns. The pace of this novel is great. It is written with Michael as the narrator. Michael tells his own story. Then he switches from time to time to parts of his dad's journal and reacts to what he learns. The story sort of turns into a morbid mystery, but one that is easy to read and well written. I found it very touching. I hope others do, too. (  ) SqueakyChu | Dec 4, 2015 |  ) ehines | Apr 22, 2014 | no reviews | add a review
Not Me is a remarkable debut novel that tells the dramatic and surprising stories of two men-father and son-through sixty years of uncertain memory, distorted history, and assumed identity. When Heshel Rosenheim, apparently suffering from Alzheimer's disease, hands his son, Michael, a box of moldy old journals, an amazing adventure begins-one that takes the reader from the concentration camps of Poland to an improbable love story during the battle for Palestine, from a cancer ward in New Jersey to a hopeless marriage in San Francisco. The journals, which seem to tell the story of Heshel's life, are so harrowing, so riveting, so passionate, and so perplexing that Michael becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about his father. As Michael struggles to come to grips with his father's elusive past, a world of complex and disturbing possibilities opens up to him-a world in which an accomplice to genocide may have turned into a virtuous Jew and a young man cannot recall murdering the person he loves most; a world in which truth is fiction and fiction is truth and one man's terrible-or triumphant-transformation calls history itself into question. Michael must then solve the biggest riddle of all: Who am I?Intense, vivid, funny, and entirely original, Not Me is an unsparing and unforgettable examination of faith, history, identity, and love. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.64)
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