Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered

Amazon.com
"Instead of God I believe in ghosts," writes the literary scholar Ruth Kluger in this harrowing memoir of life under the yellow star, a controversial bestseller in Germany.

Born in Vienna, Kluger somehow survived a girlhood spent in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Gross-Rosen. Some of the lessons she imparts are surprising, as when she argues, against other historians, that the female camp guards were far more humane than their male counterparts, and when she admits that she has difficulty today queuing in line, a constant of camp life, "out of revulsion for the bovine activity of simply standing." Her memories of her youth are punctuated by sharp reflections on the meaning of the Shoah and how it should best be memorialized in a time when ever fewer survivors are left to act as witnesses. Those reflections are often angry--"Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps," she writes, recalling an argument with a naive German graduate student, "and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for?"

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this provocative memoir, Ruth Kluger presents the story of a life fully lived against all odds. Taking us into the experience of the Holocaust as few writers have before, she offers one of the most powerful accounts of the dark heart of the twentieth century -- and of a reclaimed life beyond.

Swept up as a child in the events of the Nazi era, Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. At the age of seven, she found that she was no longer welcome to sit on the park benches of her beloved hometown; at eleven she was deported to the first in the series of concentration camps that would become the setting for her precarious coming-of-age.

Kluger witnessed an underworld of deprivation and death at Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Christianstadt, the camps where she was interned along with her mother. Through a combination of defiant determination and inexplicable grace, the two survived and made a desperate flight to freedom. But their difficult journey would continue, and their conflicted relationship become more frayed, as they struggled to begin a new life in occupied Germany and later in New York City.

There Ruth faced the challenge of constructing an autonomous identity without betraying her past. Haunted by the ghosts of the dead, hemmed in by traditional Jewish culture, and confronting the limits placed on women in postwar America, she had to reach deep into her store of courage to establish her independence and find her voice.

Kluger's narrative of the war years and their aftermath is marked by the blunt, unsentimental observations of childhood. Her deft interweaving of these memories with philosophical and historical reflection yields a memoir that is emotionally gripping yet subtly argued and often wry. Rejecting all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal, Kluger summons our attention back to the particular reality, and responsibility, of each individual.

On publication in Germany, Still Alive sparked renewed discussion about the Holocaust. It has since been hailed across Europe as a literary masterwork. Published here in English for the first time, it presents a personal voice emerging through and against history. In her tale of survival, Kluger offers us a model of self-determination and tells of a passage to freedom achieved through fierce adherence to inner truth. As Johannes Rau, president of the Federal Republic of Germany, has said, Kluger's work shows that "the single, unique human being matters, always and in every situation, that every life is unlike every other life, unalterably and irrevocably."

FROM THE CRITICS

Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post Book World

The literature of the Holocaust is vast and ever-growing, some of it of an uncommonly high order, but Ruth Kluger's Still Alive moves at once to the forefront.

Publishers Weekly

In the 1950s, when Kluger's children were small and growing up in the U.S., she caught German measles from them. Her family doctor said, "You must have led a sheltered childhood." In reality, she spent her early years in Theresienstadt and Birkenau-Auschwitz. Kluger's memoir which has already become a bestseller in Germany is a startling, clear-eyed and unflinching examination of growing up as a Jewish girl during the Holocaust. Calmly, and chillingly, relating the everyday events of her youth Aryan students making colored paper swastikas and then asking Jewish students to judge them, breaking the law to go to an Aryan movie house to see Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and being challenged by a neighbor Kluger charts how she and her family moved from a middle-class Viennese life to dealing with the constant threat of death in the camps. Kluger's style is wry ("the muse of history has a way of cracking bad jokes at the expense of the Jews"), and she can shock readers with simple, honest admissions, such as her embarrassment, in the 1970s, when her mother asks unanswerable questions of a speaker about the death camps. Kluger, who is now professor emerita at UC-Irvine and has won awards for this memoir as well as her literary criticism, has written a deeply moving and significant work that raises vital questions about cultural representations of the Holocaust (why did the highly praised, socially conscious 1947 film Gentleman's Agreement never mention "the Jewish catastrophe"?) and searches for what it means to be a survivor. Already compared by European critics to the work of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, this is an important addition to Jewish, Holocaust and women's studies. (Nov.)Forecast: This is a standout in the crowded field of Holocaust memoirs and should have strong sales. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"How can I keep my readers from feeling good about the obvious drift of my story away from the gas chambers and the killing fields and towards the postwar period, where prosperity beckons?" This question rests at the heart of Kluger's story of survival: how to tell of her own escape from a concentration camp without rousing a sense of well-being and relief in readers who get wrapped up in her own "happy ending"? Kluger solves this dilemma by deftly combining her own compelling narrative with a rigorous commentary that is sure to provoke, challenge, and unsettle most readers. She tells the dramatic story of living in concentration camps but decries the preservation of these camps as museums: "[the museums] don't take you in, they spit you out." And while she married one of the American paratroopers who participated in the liberation, she resents the "careless and unprepared" American soldiers who could not face the exhausted, starved victims. Kluger describes herself as "inclined to question and contradict," and her memoir, translated from German by the author herself, adds a spirited and original voice to the field of Holocaust literature. Amy Strong, East Boothbay, ME Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews