Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Everyday Jewish Lives Divided by Time

Once There Was a Town: The Memory Books of a Lost Jewish World by Jane Ziegelman

Matzah Ball Blues by Jennifer Wilck

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I did not mean to make it a Jewish double feature, but I just happened to read these books around the same time, and it was interesting to see the same traditions discussed in a historical context and then in an average middle-class family from New Jersey. Once There Was a Town by Jane Ziegelman – 3 stars After the Holocaust, since entire shtetls had been reduced to just a handful of survivors, people across continents came together to put together yizkor books to record […]

“She was a nice girl from a good family.”

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan J. Eischeid

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As Head Overseer of the woman’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maria Mandl was the highest-ranked female perpetrator of the Holocaust. In this book, author Eischeid examines how she came to reach this position, and more broadly the role of women in the Nazi killing machine. The architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust that most people are familiar with are male, but female Nazi party members played a major role in running the concentration camps too. Though the vast majority of them managed to slip back into […]

Helped define what the Holocaust feels like to most who didn’t go through it

Night by Elie Wiesel

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I’m not really sure how to review Night by Elie Wiesel. It’s a seminal fictionalized Holocaust memoir that’s been taught for decades in schools across the world. Along with Schindler’s List, it’s probably defined how I’ve thought of the Holocaust for most of my life. Reading it again didn’t really bring with it any new information or perspective – though it lands different reading it as a father compared to reading it as a teenager, like I did the first time. For something to indelible, […]

I feel sort of guilty that I didn’t connect with this more

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The two volumes of Maus are Art Spiegelman’s attempts to document the struggles of his parents before and during the Second World War, as well as his not always harmonious relationship with his elderly father. The framing narrative shows Art interviewing his father Vladek about his recollections of the time before and during the war, as well as trying to deal with his temperamental parent, despite their many differences. The illustrations are famous and the subject matter is, of course, very worthy. So why didn’t […]

A war-time fable that didn’t really work for me

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Nine-year-old Bruno lives in a big house in Berlin and is not at all happy when the household is packed up and he, his mother, his older sister and the servants are forced to travel by train to a new house, far away in the desolate countryside. He misses the bustling city, the house with such a great banister for sliding down, his grandparents, his friends, even his school. At the new house, there is no one to play with, just a small garden and […]



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