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Hardcover
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN13: 9780299231507
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Lev Raphael grew up loathing everything German. A son of Holocaust survivors, haunted by his parents’ suffering and traumatic losses under Nazi rule, he was certain that Germany was one place in the world he would never visit. Those feelings shaped his Jewish and gay identity, his life, and his career.
Then the barriers of a lifetime began to come down, as revealed in this moving memoir. After his mother’s death, while researching her war years, Raphael found a distant relative living in the very city where she had been a slave laborer.
What would he learn if he actually traveled to the place where his mother had found freedom and met his father? Not long after that epochal trip, a German publisher bought several of his books for translation. Raphael was launched on book tours in Germany, discovering not so much a new Germany, but a new self: someone unafraid to face the past and transcend it.
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| Layers of Understanding |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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I choose to read this book because Lev Raphael is one of my favorite authors of short stories, comedy of manners mysteries, and essays. I then re-read "The German Money" and "Winter Eyes" discovering and recovering an even greater appreciation of these two novels. Nabokov contends that the full reading experience does not occur until a book is re-read. This memoir provoked me to re-read those novels. "My Germany" has a special resonance for me: when I was 11 years old and traveling from the Netherlands to Denmark by night train in 1960, my grandmother pulled down the shades so I could not get even a glimpse of Germany. The previous year she had made a big fuss when my parents purchased a VW Van. As a child, I was imbued with such negative feelings about Germany that I could not envision visiting that country and have not as an adult. Raphael has had the courage to travel the country, learn the language, and dig into his parents' past that they would not speak of. The most fascinating part of the book was the recounting of his parents' history. This memoir makes for a wonderful introduction to Raphael's other writings but also stands alone on its own merits in that popular genre. "My Germany" deserves at least one reading by those who are Raphael's fans but also by those unfamiliar with this author.
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| Why is this entitled "My Germany"? |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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Somehow "My Germany" did not touch me emotionally. I was born in Germany, emigrated to the U.S. in 1936 at the age of nine. I had deep connections to my home town in Germany and with much ambivalence visited there in 1983. I experienced hugely mixed feelings about going and about Germany and its people while I was there. I felt hugely fond of my hometown and the villages where my relatives had lived. Indeed, I felt regret that I could not call this land of the Holocaust "My Germany" which it had once been. I had to remind myself over and over again that my bad memories should not make me condemn the generations of Germans that were born after the Holocaust.
I've read voluminously about the Holocaust and Lev Raphael's descriptions of what happened to his mother is similar to countless descriptions in countless other sources. And his writing style, in my opinion, is more anecdotal than expressive and moving. I found myself skimming most of the book and hoping that at the end I would truly understand why Raphael entitled this book "My Germany." I still do not know why.
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| A Memoir Worthy of its Genre |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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It's almost a dichotomous memoir, this eloquent story of two generations tied together by more than blood. The subtitle--A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped--is an excellent encapsulation since the book is the story of Lev Raphael's childhood world, the world of his parents and their experiences, and of his adult world seeking to round out what he grew up knowing and not knowing. Yet this book is more than that. Raphael is the son of Holocaust survivors. Not surprisingly, though they talk about it very little, the impact of his parents' experiences dominates their lives to the end. It also impacts their son. While leaving him crippled in some ways by the much-hated Germany--for a long time he refused to buy German-made products or visit the country--he also makes a living by writing stories about people during and after the Holocaust.
Then when he is sent on an author tour in Germany he is forced to realize that his feelings and his knowledge is not the entire truth for himself or for his history. As he begins to sort through meetings with the modern country that is Germany, with Germans of several generations, of the food and culture and music, and especially as he undertakes the extensive research to add to his knowledge of his parent's pre-American lives and their experiences in concentration camps, he begins to find an understanding that not only reveals things his parents, especially his mother, never spoke about but that enlarges their world and his world.
My Germany is not a "Jewish" book. It is a powerful, sensitive memoir of one writer seeking hard answers to harder questions and in doing so discovering that legacies are not always what we are handed.
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| The Sensitive Seeker Questions |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Lev Raphael's varied and multi-layered work continues to delight and inform his readers. He is, by all accounts, the number one writer of the second generation of survivors. My Germany is a book unique in approach and material. The story of Raphael's book tour in Germany, it engrosses the reader in history, loss, forgiveness and Raphael's legendary sense of play. His search for his feared and adored mother graces the book tour so that it becomes no mere travelogue but a story of mourning and love. If for nothing else than the mesmerizing tale of his lecture back here in New York before a hostile audience, do read this book. Raphael learns one of the great lessons of history: Revenge is sweet, so sweet, and hardly worth abandoning for sensitivity, forgiveness or a mixed and complicated historical understanding. This book astounds as does Night, and lingers in the reader's heart and mind like the sincere seeker's warm, alluring smile. Germany fascinates Raphael as Raphael with his humor, intelligence, experience as a child of survivors, the son who has returned to cross a horrifying internal landscape, fascinates Germany. His tale will remind you of the wise mother's response to the nightmare: Make friends with the monster. In this way, Raphael gains the right to call his amazing book, "My" Germany. There has never been a survivor's journey like this one, for he has come to see, to clarify, to know, to fashion for himself the meaning of the twentieth-century's worst tragedy.
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| Disappointed |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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This book was not what I thought it would be. Perhaps as a non-Jew or child of a survivor I couldn't appreciate it as much as the previous reviewers did. I found what got in my way was his conflict with his sexual orientation. To me it took away from what he was talking about- finding peace with his religion and with the country of his parents. I found the other distracting and would not have bought the book had I known. His sexual preference is his business and was not what I had expected to read. The book was well written though if you can get past that and into what I had thought I was purchasing.
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