The Family Moskat (edition 1980)

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Panoramic family novel describing life in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Jewish families--Fiction.

I grew up with this book, literally. It came to symbolize all my family lost in the Holocaust. Though we're originally not from Eastern Europe (from Germany instead), the Holocaust managed to bring together all of us in mutual tragedy. All families became one, and I imagine this must not be an easy thing to grasp unless you experience it from within the group. As I did. So Singer captured all this in a masterly way, and this book is just a pleasure to read from start to finish. Characters are extremely well drawn, plot is consistent and broad without losing focus, just perfect rhythm throughout. The world of the Moskat family may not exist anymore, but thanks to Singer we will always know what it was like, what it smelled and looked like, what it felt like. ( )

This is a remarkable family chronicle about Jews in Warsaw living in the fist of time that clenched Jewish tradition with modernization and murdered the living Jewry via the monstrous Nazi regime of Hitler. It is even more remarkable how lovely and unsentimentally poetic the writing is considering this novel was published in 1950. The story begins in the earlier 1900s and ends with the Nazis preparing to storm Warsaw in 1939. Yet only a hundred pages before the end with the Holocaust already on the horizon a hilarious farce is borne out of a cardiac arrest. This novel is therefore not just a tragedy, it is also a comedy, but never both at the same time. The final chapter in context of history is an absolute heartbreaker.

The story left untold in Family Moskat:
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-warsaw.htm ( )