Couldn't get into this. Skimmed most of it. For class. ( )

An excellent book, though suffering from over-indulgent editing - the Biblical commentaries should come out, and the whole thing is too long.
But a fantastic read and teaching about the reality of the Holocaust and how it continues to reverberate down the generations. ( )

Amazing! A haunting story that taught me more about Jewish traditions and the Holocaust than I could ever have imagined. Also makes excellent points about such things about time and experience. For example, the author discovers even though he is Jewish, no matter how much he conducts researches about the Holocaust and what his ancestors may have endured, he will never know what it was really like since he wasn't there. Highly recommended. Probably the best book I have read this year! ( )

I am so glad I read this book. A classmate of my son's father was killed at the Pentagon on 9/11 and my reaction was similar: I needed to put a face on that tragedy. More than any other history I have read, Mendelsohn has put a human face on the tragedy of the depravity of World War II. He also put a face on the generosity of spirit of that same time.

I went through different phases during this book. First i couldn't get into it, then it was ok but not great, then sometime around page 250 i got completely sucked in and ended up loving this book. it is a 5. I think it is the way the story is written. the author put little asides in, like "or so we thought then" or "until i found out differently" and such. at first, you just want to know what actually happened and the asides are annoying but as the book unfolds it makes more and more sense.

The author begins by telling stories of his childhood, the stories of things that happened to him and things that his family, especially his grandfather, told him. Mendelsohn knows his grandfather's brother, Shmiel, and Shmiel's wife and four daughters, all died during the Holocaust. No one knows exactly how and when. Mendelsohn begins researching these lost family members and about the city of Bolechow, Poland, where they lived. The search takes him all over Europe, to Australia and Israel as well. I can't say too much about what he finds as it would take away from the story. It is a great story though.

Here's a quote:

To be alive is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. when you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else's tale, it means that you are truly dead.

I do wish that the pictures had captions. Mendelsohn talks about a lot of people, in his family as well as others he speaks to about the Jagers, and he only randomly posts the pictures but none have captions. sometimes it doesn't matter because he's just described the person in the picture or the picture itself, but other times it is strange because he's talking about the girls and the picture shows several of them. How are we supposed to know which is which? Maybe that is part of his story, the uncertainty of what you think and what you know. ( )