If I Should Die Before I Wake

From Publishers Weekly
Few novels can match this effort for its stupefying lack of taste. Teenager Hilary, who has never recovered from the long-ago death of her father and from her Bible-thumping mother's temporary abandonment of her, lies in a coma, the victim of her own adventures with her neo-Nazi pals. Suddenly she "slips" into another life--that of a Jewish girl in Poland at the beginning of the Nazi occupation. It turns out that she is sharing the memories of her hospital roommate, whose telepathic communications eventually bring about Hilary's salvation. Gratuitously lurid subplots involve teenage American neo-Nazi depredations and the torture of Hilary's young Jewish neighbor; the Holocaust flashbacks feature a psychic grandmother. Passages about Nazi ghettos and concentration camps seem cobbled together from survivors' memoirs (noticeably, Kitty Hart's several autobiographies and Fania Fenelon's Playing for Time ), while the overall conceit owes a major debt to Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic. Any hope that the author will redeem this misbegotten first novel is quickly quashed by her unrelievedly airless prose. Ages 12-up. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
Grade 7-12-Hilary Burke, a young Neo-Nazi, is in a coma after a motorcycle accident. Ironically, she has been taken to a Jewish hospital and shares a room with elderly Chana, an Auschwitz survivor. Instrumental in the kidnapping of her 13-year-old Jewish neighbor, Hilary hates all Jews and believes one caused her father's death. Through Chana's memories, the girl is transported back to World War II, experiencing for herself the horrors suffered by Polish Jews just trying to survive, first in the Lodz ghetto, then in the concentration camp. While the subject matter is certainly compelling, this first novel is not as powerful as Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic (Viking, 1988) or as chilling as Jay Bennett's Skinhead (Watts, 1991). Nolan does a better job of portraying Chana than Hilary or her Bible-quoting mother, but Mrs. Burke's dysfunctional personality and Hilary's problems with her are clear. Interspersed are Biblical passages that are sometimes appropriate to the text, but often unnecessary and distracting. The ending is predictable and soppy: Chana dies leaving an album full of family photos to Hilary. Stick to the numerous, excellent-quality, existing examples of Holocaust literature.Jo-Anne Weinberg, Greenburgh Public Library, NYCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Gr. 7-10. High-school student Hilary Burke, whose rebellion against her fundamentalist Christian mother takes the form of hanging out with local neo-Nazis, lies unconscious in an intensive-care ward after a motorcycle accident. The other patient in the unit is an aged Holocaust survivor, Chana Bergman. Before returning to consciousness, Hilary slips into Chana's memory and travels back in time to the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz. Chana's chapters dominate the text until the elderly woman dies and Hilary returns to life, no longer anti-Semitic. This first novel has great strengths and weaknesses. The time travel is contrived, the characterization of Hilary's mother is shallow and unbelievable, a hospital fire set by neo-Nazis is an unnecessary plot element, and the preachy message about the "new" Hilary changing the world is tabloid psychodrama. Chana's story, however, is brilliantly rendered. Without sensationalizing or blurring, Nolan evokes the physical and emotional crowding of shared living space, the desperate struggle for food each day, and the compromises required for survival. Despite the contrived machinery through which it's introduced, Chana's story carries memorable emotional impact. Mary Harris Veeder


From Kirkus Reviews
Nolan's first novel is ambitious indeed: she frames the story of teenage Chana's survival in the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz with a second story, about a young neo-Nazi who--after a motorcycle accident from which her vicious boyfriend escapes unscathed--is in the intensive care unit where Chana is dying half a century later. Also near death, Hilary relives Chana's ordeal and eventually recovers to carry on Chana's role as Holocaust witness. There are some real strengths here: Chana's experiences--losing her family, one by one; escaping Lodz with her grandmother only to be jailed, tortured, identified as a Jew, and sent to the concentration camp; brutal conditions, desperate survival techniques, and alliances and betrayals among Jewish inmates; the degradation of playing the violin for the Nazis in order to survive--are evidently selected in order to depict a range of horrors; but they're also graphically and tellingly portrayed. Hilary is less convincing: her troubled past is too briefly sketched to make a firm basis for her almost sensationalized fanaticism, while her change of heart doesn't develop; it simply emerges full-blown. Still, juxtaposing the virulent paranoia of present-day skinheads with their forebears' atrocities is a bold basis for a novel; if some of the transitions here are a bit awkward, the book as a whole is deeply felt and often compelling. (Fiction. 12+) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Hilary hates Jews. As part of a neo-Nazi gang in her town, she's finally found a sense of belonging. But when she's critically injured in an accident, everything changes.
Somehow, in her mind, she has become Chana, a Jewish girl fighting for her own life in the ghettos and concentration camps of World War II.
Han Nolan offers powerful insight into one young woman's survival through the Holocaust and another's journey out of hatred and self-loathing.
Reader's guide and an interview with the author included.



Card catalog description
As Hilary, a Neo-Nazi initiate, lies in a coma, she is transported back to Poland at the onset of World War II into the life of a Jewish teenager.


About the Author
HAN NOLAN has won many awards for her teen fiction, including the National Book Award for Dancing on the Edge. She lives in New England.



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As I write, Schindler's List plays nearby and Florida's governor has just signed a bill requiring the study of the Holocaust and the topic of genocide to become regular fixtures of the secondary-school curriculum. It is ironic that I am asked to review If I Die Before I Wake, the first-person-singular story of a Neo-Nazi skinhead who becomes transformed into a caring and loving human being. Knocked into a coma by a motorcycle accident, Hilary, the Neo-Nazi initiate, lands in a Jewish hospital, where, moving in and out of consciousness, she travels through her dreams to Poland at the onset of World War II. There, in her mind's eye, she becomes, of all people, Chana, a young Jewish girl whose family has been sent by the Nazis to live in a Jewish ghetto. In Chana's horrifying world, death is an everyday occurrence and the next stop for most of its residents is Auschwitz. This is a good read, perfect to accompany a discussion of Schindler's List, and invaluable as a resource to understanding the incomprehensible.


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