The Lost Café Schindler: One family, two wars and the search for truth

 

The Lost Café Schindler: One family, two wars and the search for truth by Meriel Schindler is one of those marvelous books about second or even third generation children of Holocaust survivors returning to Europe to search for their lost past.

Meriel Schindler’s family suffered from displacement and loss, but as Austrian Jews who left for England before the war, the author has a significant cache of family memories and documents to guide her.

What we get is a very full treatment of a family and its loss, and eventual gains the post-war world.  The titular café, and its life and afterlife, becomes a poignant center of gravity for the tale of this family.

A Large Genus

 

Tom Higham’s The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins is an both an excellent overview, and detailed account (!) of some of the more recent work done in archeology and ancient genetics which has fundamentally altered our view of human origins.  We are, I believe, on the cusp of even more amazing discoveries about our early ancestors and hominid cousins.  In the near future, the idea of completely separable “species” of the genus homo will lose all functional meaning.

Replacing the Codes

 

The Talmud: A Biography by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer is a well-written and informative journey through the groundwork laid for the Talmud, up to its modern incarnations and possible future.  

One important element that the author lays out with great clarity (which I never fully realized before) is that the growth of “codes” to organize and in a sense replace the Talmud in the Middle Ages failed to take hold by a concerted effort by Litvak Jews and the growth of the “modern” yeshiva.  

The Litvak yeshiva held the Talmud as the pinnacle of Jewish learning, as it was (and is) so demanding to study.  This was a way to assert authority.  Wimpfheimer shows us the pride of place of the Talmud among (certain) religious Jews is in fact a modern phenomenon.

An Accomplishment

 

Raven Leilani’s novel Luster has a great sense of energy, depth, and control.  She has all the elements here of a very accomplished novel.  The main character is flawed but likable, and the plot is interesting to the point of distraction.  This novel also has many cutting and incisive things to say about race in America, but with style and panache. She has a rich palette of words and phrases that she uses in surprising, even jarring ways.  Luster is one of the more accomplished novels I have read by a young writer in a long time.

Is this Backed Up?

 

Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America posits an intriguing idea.  The murder rate of  black men is so high not because of over-policing, but a lack of policing.  Black men are over-policed for all crimes but murder.  The lack of policing leads to a kind of shadow or vigilante justice in black neighborhoods.  The police are supposed to have a monopoly on “violence.”  The fact that they is ceded in cases of black and black murder, compounds the problem, creating a power vacuum that gang fill.

Is this true?  Do statistics back it up? I am in no position to say so.  The book is about (mainly) white detectives in LAPD who decide to prosecute gang violence like any other crime.  They are painted as heroes.  The  LAPD?  Heroic people?  White saviors helping (helpless) blacks?  I feel uneasy about endorsing this book with  more information.

Getting Hurt / Getting Bored

 

Author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in literature this year (2022).  Getting Lost is her memoir of an affair with a married Soviet diplomat from 1988 to 1990.  This journal/memoir is very claustrophobic and repetitive, and I wonder why Ernaux would continue to have such an affair when it is so excruciatingly painful.  She is not married, and the diplomat is, but she never wishes for him to leave his wife. What she really wants is to experience more sex, and given the detailed erotic attention she provides him, and the acts she performs to give him pleasure, the reader does wonder why he did not visit her more.  Was he an idiot?

I can only imagine that Ernaux put herself through this affair because she is a writer, and these emotions are grist for her mill.  But this work, from my vantage point, wasn’t worth the effort.  The end product, the book, is flawed and just boring.