The County of Birches

Unlike most Holocaust literature, this collection, though it starts in Hungary, focuses on life after the Holocaust. I enjoyed the early stories more - the ones that showed how Dana's parents met and lived in Hungary both before and after the war. Once they get to Canada, we mostly see the various schools Dana attends and how her parents adjust -- the heartbreaking part is that her strong father, Apu, has the wind taken out of his sails once he leaves Hungary. Her once strong father walks with stooped shoulders. I did enjoy this collection and would recommend it. There's something lacking (perhaps lack of soul or depth) that prevents the reader from becoming 100% engaged, but it's hard to put your finger on it. Nonetheless, an impressive debut.

For those who believe literature can assist us in understanding the past and recurrent terror of unparallelled loss, of the virtual effacement of a people that is the Holocaust, "The County of Birches" will stand proudly and with dignity in their libraries. This extraordinarily well-crafted series of interlocking short stories, treating the experiences of Dana, the daughter of two survivors, compels the intellectual and emotional attention of the reader. For this novel is an excursion into geographic, temporal and existential displacement. We come to perceive life through Dana's eyes, a prescient child who begrudgingly accepts the precarious balance of her life and her parents' perceptions of survival - that a false step leads to abyss, that being Jewish in the post-Holocaust world poses terrible ethical quandires unknown and of no concern to the outside world, that present childhood carries the unfathomable weight of the past, of generations obliterated, of families literally disappearing. The author, Judith Kalman, has produced a dazzling, memorable and significant first novel.Dana Weisz is no ordinary protagonist. She shoulders the seemingly herculean task of being a child of survivors, one a proud, defiant mother whose integrity provides strength to Dana, the other, a once-aristocratic, now-humbled father whose quiet, "mysterious" love provides comfort and identity. At once, Dana senses her very existence as a replacement for her murdered half-sister but feels guilty even living a "normal" life, perceiving her own "normal" concerns as superfluous to her parents, given the trauma they have experienced. To be Jewish under these circumstances produces its own internal ambivalence. "What good had it brought any of them being Jewish...[Name] one time it ever proved an advantage to be Jewish." When her parents aggressively promote academic prowess in her older sister, Lillian, they claim: "With your brains...there is nothing you can't do." Dana responds that anything is easy "if your standard was being gassed, tortured or stripped of everything you hold dear; the rest would seem a breeze." Kalman is at her best when she describes Dana's devastating encounter with contemporary Jewish indifference (circa 1965) to the Holocaust. Dana's experiment in Sabbath school results in her being profoundly insulted by her Jewish classmates who make crass jokes about the Holocaust when they examine a Life magazine twenty-year retrospective. Judith Kalman's stirring narrative alone, which encompasses three generations of history and three distinct geographic settings, distinguishes this novel. But Ms. Kalman peppers her stories with sentences about the Holocaust that hit home very, very hard. This rather compact novel has unbelievable impact. It is not an easy or quick read; it forces the reader to stop, to ponder, to question, to try to understand. The author serves both history and memory admirably.

This collection of short stories is certainly exceptional. I couldn't put the book down after I picked it up. Anyone even remotely interested in Holocaust or post-holocaust literature absolutely has to read this collection. It is both powerful and moving, evoking startlingly beautiful description and poetry. If you read one more book in your life this absolutely has to be it.

If "Gone by the wind" is describing the end of an era in the American way of life, so "The county of Birches" describes the end of a era in that part of the world.In addition though, "The County of Birches" continues in describing life in a new world, and how the roots and fears of the old world intrude and mark life even in the second generation.The book is written with sensitivity,warmth and humor. A very enjoyable lecture.