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Average Customer Rating:

A Must Read

Customer Rating:

I was attracted to this book because I thought it might provide a fresh view of the holocaust. It certainly did. Infinitely better than I had expected. absolutely not a holocaust misery memoir. Because the book is based on letters, there is real insight into this family as a normal, rounded bunch of people with the usual flaws and foibles. Their story is touching and heart rending.. totally gripping..

Bringing the past to life

Customer Rating:

This is a most remarkable and moving book. It is about ordinary people, told from the letters they wrote, the diaries that they kept, the stories and family jokes that they told each other, from their beginnings in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and finally in England. They spanned two world wars, and the Holocaust. And, of course some died. This is a history that comes down from the scale of Grand Events to the level of the individual. Nancy Kohner lived just long enough to complete this book, and she was in a way more the archaeologist of her family than its historian. She was too young to experience what she describes. She worked with her father, her aunt, read thousands of letters and other documents, learned the history of all the objects relating to her family - trunks and boxes of them -that had been brought by her father and her uncle, as they fled from Czechoslovakia to England as the Nazis closed in 1939. From this huge,, disorganised mass of material, she has recreated an unforgettable, complex, unsentimental, image of their lives. But as she writes of them, she is writing about many families, with (of course) quite different experiences, yet possess the same mixture of joy, squabbles, , disappointments, and darker places that she presents. This book gives us a historical truth. Purists (and pedants) could complain that she could not know just how something happened in 1913: where are the documents that prove it? That is not important, except in the most trivial box-ticking sense. What she presents with astonishing skill is the inner life of a family. I have not read a book like this for years, and it will be my personal star for 2008.

A remarkable insight

Customer Rating:

There are two sides to this book. On the one hand it shares the life of a family of letter writers as they go about the simple business of keeping in touch. It joins them in a period of relative happiness at the beginning of the 20th Century, and follows the slow evolution of their family life as distance and circumstance take their toll in the decades leading up to the second world war. For this biography alone, and the absorbingly vivid story it tells, it should be read and shared. On the other hand it is a reflection of the author herself, and this is where it stands apart. Kohner's longing for a connection with the family she never knew is infectious. It is so much more than biography because of the personality the author brings. Her warmth, longing, honesty, and humour bring the book to life, not only advancing a connection between the reader and a bygone time, but between the reader and herself. This book is the product of an archive Kohner spent a lifetime amassing in order to learn about her family. It will no doubt form a cornerstone for future generations wishing to learn about her.