Nir Baram
Author of Good People
About the Author
Works by Nir Baram
A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (2016) 54 copies, 3 reviews
ספרי לי סיפור אהבה סגול 2 copies
Dobri ljudi 1 copy
צל העולם 1 copy
אנשים טובים 1 copy
העולם הוא שמועה 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Baram, Nir
- Legal name
- ברעם, ניר
- Other names
- BARAM, Nir
ברעם, ניר - Birthdate
- 1976-06-02
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Tel Aviv University (BA|Hebrew literature)
- Occupations
- journalist
author - Nationality
- Israel
- Birthplace
- Jerusalem, Israel
- Places of residence
- Jerusalem, Israel
- Associated Place (for map)
- Jerusalem, Israel
Members
Reviews
Yesterday at the Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival, I asked Nir Baram the wrong question about his stunning novel Good People. I asked him if he meant us to be wary of contemporary commercial entities who are complicit in marketing government messages, but I should have asked him, did he mean for us to be wary of ourselves.
That’s because, in the course of teasing out the reasons why authors should be writing fiction about the Holocaust, Baram shared a shaming statistic. He said that some show more people are interested in asking themselves the question, what would I have done in that situation. But the answer is already known: 89% of people collaborated. Fiction is a useful way of exploring the motivations of characters who represent that overwhelming majority, if we wish to understand why.
The title of the novel is not entirely ironic. The novel follows the hopes and ambitions of two ordinary people confronting the apparatus of totalitarian regimes, and the author makes the reader confront the reality of ‘goodness’ when it’s tested. Thomas Heiselberg is in Nazi Berlin and Sasha Weissberg is in Stalin’s Leningrad. The story begins in 1938 when the world is on the cusp of war and the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact is yet to be signed. Both characters start out in naïveté, thinking that they can outwit the State, neither understanding that they are out of their depth.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/05/23/good-people-by-nir-baram-translated-by-jeffr... show less
That’s because, in the course of teasing out the reasons why authors should be writing fiction about the Holocaust, Baram shared a shaming statistic. He said that some show more people are interested in asking themselves the question, what would I have done in that situation. But the answer is already known: 89% of people collaborated. Fiction is a useful way of exploring the motivations of characters who represent that overwhelming majority, if we wish to understand why.
The title of the novel is not entirely ironic. The novel follows the hopes and ambitions of two ordinary people confronting the apparatus of totalitarian regimes, and the author makes the reader confront the reality of ‘goodness’ when it’s tested. Thomas Heiselberg is in Nazi Berlin and Sasha Weissberg is in Stalin’s Leningrad. The story begins in 1938 when the world is on the cusp of war and the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact is yet to be signed. Both characters start out in naïveté, thinking that they can outwit the State, neither understanding that they are out of their depth.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/05/23/good-people-by-nir-baram-translated-by-jeffr... show less
Despite the title, there are only a few good people in this book. But it is still a fascinating and dramatic story set in Germany, Poland and Russia in the years before World War II (from the Kristallnacht) and the first years of the war (until the German invasion of Russia).
The focus of the book is on two people, the German Thomas and the Russian Jew Sasha, who try to survive while two totalitarian systems overwhelm their country, their families and their lives. They both try to survive in show more their own way and the choices they make help them, but harm the people who are dear to them. They are blinded by ambition and the desire to save their family. And not only that: they are ultimately part of the system that wants to destroy them, and they thus contribute to the death of many more others. Thomas, because the results of his work is used by the Nazis to murder large groups in the German and Polish society and Sasha because she serves the purges of Stalin.
The book shows in a dramatic way how powerless Thomas and Sasha are to oppose the events around them. Each step they take brings damage in their surroundings, while they are desperately trying to rationalize the events and escape from the disaster. But the world around them collapses. The atrocities follow one another. Baram does not explicitly describe the horrors of these years, but shows flashes. The very absence of explicit descriptions is powerful. The panic among the Jews in Poland after the German occupation, displayed in an image of Jewish women in faded clothes and bare boots, trying to get visa. A spotlight that shines briefly on naked prisoners. And Thomas who sees but denies everything, and continues to justify his deeds, wallowing in his own suffering. Even so Sasha, who is willing to send hundreds to Siberian camps while trying to save her brother - something that is obviously impossible.
The book is very well written and compelling. Alternately there is a chapter which focuses on Sasha and Thomas. Eventually they meet in a final impossible plan to survive. And when you finish it, the characters stay with you for some time. Highly recommended! show less
The focus of the book is on two people, the German Thomas and the Russian Jew Sasha, who try to survive while two totalitarian systems overwhelm their country, their families and their lives. They both try to survive in show more their own way and the choices they make help them, but harm the people who are dear to them. They are blinded by ambition and the desire to save their family. And not only that: they are ultimately part of the system that wants to destroy them, and they thus contribute to the death of many more others. Thomas, because the results of his work is used by the Nazis to murder large groups in the German and Polish society and Sasha because she serves the purges of Stalin.
The book shows in a dramatic way how powerless Thomas and Sasha are to oppose the events around them. Each step they take brings damage in their surroundings, while they are desperately trying to rationalize the events and escape from the disaster. But the world around them collapses. The atrocities follow one another. Baram does not explicitly describe the horrors of these years, but shows flashes. The very absence of explicit descriptions is powerful. The panic among the Jews in Poland after the German occupation, displayed in an image of Jewish women in faded clothes and bare boots, trying to get visa. A spotlight that shines briefly on naked prisoners. And Thomas who sees but denies everything, and continues to justify his deeds, wallowing in his own suffering. Even so Sasha, who is willing to send hundreds to Siberian camps while trying to save her brother - something that is obviously impossible.
The book is very well written and compelling. Alternately there is a chapter which focuses on Sasha and Thomas. Eventually they meet in a final impossible plan to survive. And when you finish it, the characters stay with you for some time. Highly recommended! show less
Good People is an early novel by Israeli author Nir Baram, who also wrote A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank a memoir that I've seen reviewed well more than once here on LT. This is a novel about the ways in which people who think of themselves as "good" can easily get tripped up by their own illusions and entangled in compromises within evil systems. The book begins in 1938 and follows two characters. Thomas Heiselberg is a young businessman in show more Berlin. He a market researcher and rising quickly within an American-owned company. He has devised the company's business strategies for their branch offices in Berlin, Warsaw and Paris. He is not antiSemitic, and though he mostly goes along to get along, he does try to help his Jewish therapist escape Germany and makes other such gestures. He sees himself as a master persuader, able to put any face forward that he needs to accomplish any given agenda, and to get people to act accordingly, and to manage any situation. Sasha Weissberg is a young woman in Leningrad, the daughter of intellectuals, who begins reporting on the conversations of her parents circle of poets and philosophers to the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, imagining she is thereby somehow protecting her parents. Both characters become ever more firmly ensnared in the trap of their own self-regard and their confidence in their abilities to turn the power of the evil worlds they are navigating to their own ends.
We see the world very tightly through the perspectives of these two characters, and so the narrative takes on a somewhat hallucinatory character, and yet also maintains (or at least maintain for me) a certain thinness of scope that left me wanting a touch more, somehow. Also, I thought the book could have used some editing, shedding perhaps 20% of the 421 pages of my Australian edition. Nevertheless, Good People is an impressive achievement, I think, and overall I very much enjoyed the reading experience. Whether or not we're meant to experience the novel as any sort of allegory for contemporary (the book was first published in Hebrew in 2010) is unclear to me, though we know that Baram has been a voice for the left in Israel. show less
We see the world very tightly through the perspectives of these two characters, and so the narrative takes on a somewhat hallucinatory character, and yet also maintains (or at least maintain for me) a certain thinness of scope that left me wanting a touch more, somehow. Also, I thought the book could have used some editing, shedding perhaps 20% of the 421 pages of my Australian edition. Nevertheless, Good People is an impressive achievement, I think, and overall I very much enjoyed the reading experience. Whether or not we're meant to experience the novel as any sort of allegory for contemporary (the book was first published in Hebrew in 2010) is unclear to me, though we know that Baram has been a voice for the left in Israel. show less
For most of my adult life, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a incomprehensible morass of claim and counter claim, with horrific violence committed by both sides. It seems like an intractable conflict, destined never to be resolved. But I once thought of the Northern Ireland conflict in the same way, and yet there is peace there now. It may be an uneasy peace – especially in the aftermath of the last UK election – but the Good Friday Agreement has allowed a generation to grow up show more in peace and the longer it holds the more there is to lose by breaking it. So it was in the spirit of tentative optimism that I tackled Nir Baram’s new book, A Land without Borders, my journey around East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Nir Baram is the author of one of the best books I read last year. His novel Good People (2016, Text Publishing, first published in 2010, see my review), was an exploration of the reasons why otherwise good people in totalitarian regimes end up collaborating with evil. At the 2016 Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival Baram said that it is known that 98% of people do collaborate, and fiction is a useful way of exploring the motivations of characters who represent that overwhelming majority. Yet Baram has chosen not to use fiction for his new book, which steers a course through East Jerusalem and the West Bank: he has taken a journalistic approach and allowed the people he interviewed about the conflict to speak for themselves. What is interesting is the way that nearly all of these intractable opponents find ways to justify their motivations, just as Baram’s fictional characters did.
Baram is an Israeli citizen born in Jerusalem to a political family, so he’s not an indifferent spectator. But what he has tried to do is to go behind the separation wall in Jerusalem, and into the contentious Jewish settlements on the West Bank, to listen to opposing points of view. He interviews secular and orthodox believers on both sides, he talks to survivors of the war in Gaza, and he meets Palestinians who have spent half their lives in prison, using it as an opportunity to get an education and remembering it as a time when they actually had more autonomy in their lives. He hears about the privatisation of kibbutzim and how that shapes political attitudes. He sees pride in the accomplishments and courage of the settlers.
He goes into Ramallah where a little boy is gobsmacked by his presence:
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/07/19/a-land-without-borders-by-nir-baram-translat... show less
Nir Baram is the author of one of the best books I read last year. His novel Good People (2016, Text Publishing, first published in 2010, see my review), was an exploration of the reasons why otherwise good people in totalitarian regimes end up collaborating with evil. At the 2016 Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival Baram said that it is known that 98% of people do collaborate, and fiction is a useful way of exploring the motivations of characters who represent that overwhelming majority. Yet Baram has chosen not to use fiction for his new book, which steers a course through East Jerusalem and the West Bank: he has taken a journalistic approach and allowed the people he interviewed about the conflict to speak for themselves. What is interesting is the way that nearly all of these intractable opponents find ways to justify their motivations, just as Baram’s fictional characters did.
Baram is an Israeli citizen born in Jerusalem to a political family, so he’s not an indifferent spectator. But what he has tried to do is to go behind the separation wall in Jerusalem, and into the contentious Jewish settlements on the West Bank, to listen to opposing points of view. He interviews secular and orthodox believers on both sides, he talks to survivors of the war in Gaza, and he meets Palestinians who have spent half their lives in prison, using it as an opportunity to get an education and remembering it as a time when they actually had more autonomy in their lives. He hears about the privatisation of kibbutzim and how that shapes political attitudes. He sees pride in the accomplishments and courage of the settlers.
He goes into Ramallah where a little boy is gobsmacked by his presence:
On the street outside the building with the broken windows, the group that welcomed us in the morning gathers again. We talk about recent events. A little boy in a red Liverpool T-shirt walks past and hears us talking. He stops. ‘Inte Yahudi?’ he asks with a strange glint in his eyes ‘Are you Jewish?’ he repeats, his expression curious. I nod. He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘He’s Jewish?’ he asks the crowd around us in Arabic. One of the older Palestinians explains: the boy has never seen a Jew before. ‘He’s always hearing about Jews, but you’re the first Jew he’s ever seen in his life.’ (p. 77-8)
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/07/19/a-land-without-borders-by-nir-baram-translat... show less
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