Yaël Dayan (1939–2024)

In the darkest hour of his life, having already lost his wife, a man finds himself having to choose between the lives of one of his two sons: the demented Nazi soldiers who play with him in the concentration camp where he is imprisoned force him to make this horrific choice. And he chooses.
By a strange twist of fate, the rejected son, Daniel, survives and, at the end of the war, is taken to Israel, where he is raised in a kibbutz. When anyone asks him questions, Daniel replies that he show more remembers nothing of his past and that his whole family must have perished, but he remembers, he remembers the terrible moment when his father made his choice, and this memory poisons his life, his relationships with others, his love for women, everything, until the day when his father, who has since been found, dies for real, and then it is too late for regrets.
A beautiful book, well written, painful, a new piece of the puzzle of cruelty, the lesson of which we have apparently not learned well. show less

Haim Kalinsky is a father put in a terrible situation: the Nazi soldiers have told him he must choose one of his sons to live. Instinctively Haim reaches out to his son Shmuel. Why? Why Shmuel and not Daniel? Haim could never answer that question. Ironically, it is Shmuel who ends up dying, and Daniel, who is immediately taken away by the soldiers, who lives.

After the war, Haim remarries and moves on with his quiet life. Then one day he is approached by an Israeli aid worker who offers to show more help investigate the fate of the two boys. Hope arises in Haim, and eventually he and Daniel are put in touch. But Daniel has never been able to move on with his life. He is consumed by the memories of his father choosing Shmuel over him. After contemplating whether he even wants to write to his father and his new family, Daniel begins a very uneasy relationship with him.

All of these memories are told in flashbacks as Daniel sits in a hotel room across the street from where his father lies dying in a hospital. Indecision about whether to visit him and what he would say if he did, plague Daniel. He reviews his whole life, which he sees as a litany of loss. His final decision is bittersweet.

I found the book a sad study of love, guilt, and loss. I had a hard time relating to Haim's complacent nature and Daniel's unrelenting anger and grief. Post-war Israel must have held many such stories, but I can only hope that some were more hopeful. show less

This is very sad and beautiful story about Daniel, the survivor of a Nazi death camp and the younger of two sons who was left alone by a choice his father made. Later, after being rescued and taken to Kibbutz Gilad by Yoram, Daniel tries to reconcile the fact that his dad also survived the death camp.

At first I felt that this story was not speaking to me because it seemed that the narrator told the story rather than letting the story tell itself. Later, I became very wrapped up in the story show more because I was intrigued by Daniel's persistent inability to form permanent attachments to others and his continued aloofness with his father.

Most of the book was going back and forth between Daniel's life after the war and Daniel's father declining with advanced lung cancer. Not a book of joy, this novel is, however, a look at a deep psychological wound carried by one person throughout his life. show less