| Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered Contributor(s): Kluger, Ruth (Author), Segal, Lore (Introduction by) |
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ISBN: 1558614362 ISBN-13: 9781558614369 Publisher: Feminist Press OUR PRICE: $15.15 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2003 Annotation: Now in paperback, this European bestseller won huge -acclaim from U.S. critics, Jonathan Yardley of the "Washington Post Book World "declared this memoir of a Holocaust girlhood and a life reclaimed "one of the best books of 2001 . . . a book of surpassing, and at times brutal, honesty. . . . Among the many reasons that "Still Alive "is such an important book is its insistence that the full texture of women's existence in the Holocaust be acknowledged." Ruth Kluger's story of her years in several concentration camps, and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Still Alive is a memoir of the pursuit of selfhood against all odds, a fiercely bittersweet coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must learn never to rely on comforting assumptions, but always to seek her own truth. "A deeply moving and significant work . . . compared by European critics to the work of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel."-"Publishers Weekly" "A stunning contemplation of human relationships, power and the creation of history. . . . A work of such nuance, intelligence and force that it leaps the bounds of genre."-"Kirkus Reviews" Ruth Kluger is professor emerita of German at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of five books about German literature and the recipient of Austria's National Prize for Literary Criticism. Her widely translated memoir has won eight European Literary awards. Lore Segal's writings include the novels "Other People's Houses "and "Her First American," |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Historical - Biography & Autobiography | Women - History | Holocaust |
| Dewey: B |
| Series: Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's |
| Physical Information: 0.6" H x 5.5" W x 7.9" (0.45 lbs) 216 pages |
| Themes: - Ethnic Orientation - Jewish - Sex & Gender - Feminine - Topical - Holocaust |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: A controversial bestseller likened to Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Still Alive is a harrowing and fiercely bittersweet Holocaust memoir of survival: a book of breathtaking honesty and extraordinary insight (Los Angeles Times). Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps which would become the setting for her precarious childhood. Interwoven with blunt, unsparing observations of childhood and nuanced reflections of an adult who has spent a lifetime thinking about the Holocaust, Still Alive rejects all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal. Whether describing the abuse she met at her own mother's hand, the life-saving generosity of a woman SS aide in Auschwitz, the foibles and prejudices of Allied liberators, or the cold shoulder offered by her relatives when she and her mother arrived as refugees in New York, Kluger sees and names an unexpected reality which has little to do with conventional wisdom or morality tales. Among the reasons that Still Alive is such an important book is its insistence that the full texture of women's existence in the Holocaust be acknowledged, not merely as victims. . . . Kluger] insists that we look at the Holocaust as honestly as we can, which to her means being unsentimental about the oppressed as well as about their oppressors. --Washington Post Book World |
