The Arts

The story of the late Irena Sendler, who is credited with saving the lives of as many as 2,500 Jewish children, is already well known.  She was honored by Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem as a Righteous Gentile more than 50 years ago.  Books and movies have been written about her, with more to come, including one in which Israeli actress Gal Gadot, known as “Wonder Woman” to movie goers, has been signed to portray her.  In this novel by James D. Shipman, we meet an Irena drawn from both the historical record and Shipman’s imagination.  Some of the characters are real, but Irena’s chief antagonist, a Gestapo major called Klaus Rein, is fictional.  [Donald H. Harrison]

The prolific author Lynne Sharon Schwartz has put together a collection of 25 of her short stories that have appeared in a variety of publications, calling the resulting book Truthtelling. To go on sale on October 6, the slim volume makes for engaging reading in short, concentrated bursts. The first story in the book, also called “Truthtelling,” tells of a long-married couple exchanging confessions about misdeeds during their marriage. [Book review by Donald H. Harrison]

I have read and reviewed numerous Holocaust memoirs, but none hit me with the impact of this novel — perhaps because the author infused The Brothers of Auschwitz  with such onomatopoeia as the sounds of machine gun fire, the clubbing of human beings, the whistle of death.  This made the experience different from  reading the more flatly narrated memories of Holocaust survivors; it stimulated me to not only read about the horrors of the camp, but to empathically experience them. [Donald H. Harrison]