Gwen Edelman

This is a moving story of Kitty, a young aspiring writer, who meets Joseph Kluger, a much older published author and Holocaust survivor. They quickly become lovers, and she learns to tolerate his crude behavior and listen to his war stories. He had survived the war because his Viennese parents sent him to a foster Dutch family as the war years began. The novel traces Joseph’s life, the pair’s relationship, and their final breakup. As the novel opens, Kitty is traveling to his funeral in the Netherlands, and the book is the story of their relationship over the years they were together.… (more)

Highly atmospheric, and the cover alone is worth the price of this slim volume but Holocaust stories have been told much more convincingly and much less obliquely. The self-absorption of the Warsaw Ghetto survivor/now famous writer returned to the city of his youth after 40 years is hard to swallow and the small and large secrets that spill between him and his wife and fellow survivor seem trivial. The wife's naivete is simply unbelievable.

What, in the end, was the point? You can't go home again? Our lives are built on lies? When you can't bear yourself any longer, take another shot of vodka? The author's skill with words doesn't quite make up for the hollowness of the story.… (more)

This second novel by Gwen Edelman—like her first, War Story—explores powerful emotional twists in the lives of Holocaust survivors.

Jascha has become a respected London novelist most famous for a book about the war; his wife, Lilka, is also a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, where they met as young adults before escaping separately and being reunited in England after the war. At Lilka’s urging, Jascha accepts an invitation to speak in Warsaw and the pair travel by train to their old homeland, where the changes time has wrought, the defensive attitude of the Poles, and the secrets each of them have been keeping about what they did to survive bring back old conflicts and resurrect emotions they’d thought long forgotten.

There’s nothing simple about genocide, and Edelman has the ability to focus on the individual complications, both emotionally and psychologically, while also illuminating the larger social and cultural forces that keep us from fully understanding our past. Both honest and hopeful, The Train to Warsaw is a reminder that our life stories are never quite what they seem.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: http://litrant.tumblr.com/post/87884256431/the-past-its-never-gone-the-train-to-...… (more)