My Germany: A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped
Germany was, Raphael says, “a country I had sworn never to visit . . . anywhere I turned in that country, I might face something that had belonged to a murdered relative.” But a book tour for his Holocaust-survivor novel The German Money (2003) took him there. Haunted by his mother’s experiences in a slave labor camp, he wondered whether forgiveness is possible. In this book, that leads to flashbacks personalizing the horrors of the Holocaust. A photo of relatives in pre-war Vilna, “as much at ease as a Jew could be in Poland,” prompted musings about the Poles’ anti-Semitism, which eventuates in recollections of his mother’s desperate retreat in 1941 from the Polish-Soviet border to Vilna, where Germans were rounding up Jewish men for mass execution. Encompassing recollections of childhood with parents grimly silent on the defining experience of their lives as well as accounts of historic atrocities, Raphael’s chronicle of growth and self-discovery isn’t easy reading, but his hard-earned healing and freedom from a tortured past make it remarkably satisfying. --Whitney Scott