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Loading... The County of Birches (edition 1998)by Judith Kalman
Work InformationThe County of Birches: Stories by Judith Kalman
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Narrated by a young girl without a country, this poignant collection of stories traces one family's flight from post-Holocaust Hungary to Montreal. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: No ratings.Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
The structure of the book is powerful in its understatement in the sense that it is not didactic, but it makes the losses real, it humanizes the awful number of millions through the lives of one family. Kalman does not set out just to describe once again the horrors of the Holocaust. Instead, she illuminates the deep, almost incomprehensible losses at a personal level through her description of Apu's commitment to remembering and to being a link to the past: the survivor's need to bear witness. All of which makes him an anachronism in the new world where people have never known such horrors and who too easily can be glib about it in the abstract. The book is a description of new beginnings freighted with a past that was wonderful, but then turned terrible, and the pressures that this imposes not only on Sari and Apu, but much differently, and not without generational and sibling conflict, on their daughters who grow up with the knowledge, but not the direct experience, in a totally different society. It illustrates the power of the life force, but at the same time, the dedicated effort that is required to remember, or even to try to understand.
A passionate voice in fine writing. I'm pleased to have made the acquaintance of Judith Kalman.