One Familys Shoah Victimization, Resistance, Survival in Nazi Europe [Hardcover]

Deploying concepts of interpretation, liberation, and survival, esteemed literary critic Herbert Lindenberger reflects on the diverse fates of his family during the Holocaust. Combining public, family, and personal record with literary, musical, and art criticism, One Family's Shoah suggests a new way of writing cultural history.Preface PART I: FOUR FATES 1. Deceiving: Nathan Lindenberger and the Duplicities of Theresienstadt 2. Memorializing: Betty Lindenberger Levi as Representative Auschwitz Victim 3. Interpreting: Whether It Was Foolish or Heroic to Fire-bomb the 'Soviet Paradise' 4. Liberating: The Edelmann Family Exodus from Occupied Denmark PART II: AFTERMATH 5. Surviving: Those Who Made It Out in Time 6. Compensating: Legally, Morally, Politically 7. Re-positioning: Stages of Shoah-Consciousness

One Family's Shoah is unique among Holocaust memoirs and memorials. A brilliant literary critic and scholar, Lindenberger here turns his attention to his own German-Jewish relatives - relatives that he, of a younger generation and born in the USA, never came to know in person. Not only does he recreate the life (and death) of his aunts and uncles, many of whom perished in the camps; he interweaves their stories with reflections on famous writers and composers of the period, as well as putting before us his own highly individual historical and political analysis of the choices and decisions made by his family. Unsentimental, but never unsympathetic, One Family's Shoah will force you to think about those central words that give the author his chapter titles: 'Deceiving', 'Memorializing', 'Interpreting', 'Liberating', 'Surviving', 'Compensating', and 'Re-positioning'. For anyone interested in the actual life of representative Jewish citizens of Germany in the 1930s and 40s, One Family's Shoah is certainly indispensable. - Marjorie Perloff, author of The Vienna Paradox: A Cultural Memoir and Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the OrdilÂ