"This is a Holocaust memoir unlike all the others out there. It offers not just a perspective on what happened during such a terrible time in history, but a feminist view on the subject. Kluger remembers the Holocaust in a style that is almost conversational, as though she is still trying to understand what happened as she was writing. Her attempts to understand help us to form our own opinions. Beautiful and awful. If you have any interest in the subject, you must read this."
Publisher The Feminist Press
Publication Date 2003-04-01
Section Biography / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Audrey S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781558614369
Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps which would become the setting for her precarious childhood. Kluger's story of her years in the camps and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Interwoven with blunt, unsparing observations of childhood and nuanced reflections of an adult who has spent a lifetime thinking about the Holocaust, Still Alive rejects all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal. Whether describing the abuse she met at her own mother's hand, the life-saving generosity of a woman SS aide in Auschwitz, the foibles and prejudices of Allied liberators, or the cold shoulder offered by her relatives when she and her mother arrived as refugees in New York, Kluger sees and names an unexpected reality which has little to do with conventional wisdom or morality tales. Still Alive is a memoir of the pursuit of selfhood against all odds, a fiercely bittersweet coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must learn never to rely on comforting assumptions, but always to seek her own truth.