Customer Reviews
A Must Read - By: F. Sweet, 22 Sep 2008 
I was attracted to this book because I thought it might provide a fresh view of the holocaust. It certainly did. Infinitely better than I had expected. absolutely not a holocaust misery memoir. Because the book is based on letters, there is real insight into this family as a normal, rounded bunch of people with the usual flaws & foibles. Their story is touching & heart rending.. totally gripping..
Bringing the past to life - By: Andrew Wheatcroft, 05 Sep 2008 This is a most remarkable & moving book. It is about ordinary people, told from the letters they wrote, the diaries that they kept, the stories & family jokes that they told each other, from their beginningsin the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, & finallyin England. They spanned two world wars, & the Holocaust. And, of course some died.
This is a history that comes down from the scale of Grand Events to the level of the individual. Nancy Kohner lived just long enough to complete this book, & she wasin a way more the archaeologist of her family than its historian. She was too young to experience what she describes. She worked with her father, her aunt, read thousands of letters & other documents, learned the history of all the objects relating to her family - trunks & boxes of them -that had been brought by her father & her uncle, as they fled from Czechoslovakia to England as the Nazis closedin 1939.
From this huge,, disorganised mass of material, she has recreated an unforgettable, complex, unsentimental, image of their lives. But as she writes of them, she is writing about many families, with (of course) quite different experiences, yet possess the same mixture of joy, squabbles, , disappointments, & darker places that she presents.
This book gives us a historical truth. Purists (and pedants) could complain that she could not know just how something happenedin 1913: where are the documents that prove it? That is not important, exceptin the most trivial box-ticking sense. What she presents with astonishing skill is the inner life of a family.
I have not read a book like this for years, & it will be my personal star for 2008.
A remarkable insight - By: anonymous, 02 Aug 2008 There are two sides to this book.
On the one hand it shares the life of a family of letter writers as they go about the simple business of keepingin touch. It joins themin a period of relative happiness at the beginning of the 20th Century, & follows the slow evolution of their family life as distance & circumstance take their tollin the decades leading up to the second world war. For this biography alone, & the absorbingly vivid story it tells, it should be read & shared.
On the other hand it is a reflection of the author herself, & this is where it stands apart. Kohner's longing for a connection with the family she never knew is infectious. It is so much more than biography because of the personality the author brings. Her warmth, longing, honesty, & humour bring the book to life, not only advancing a connection between the reader & a bygone time, but between the reader & herself. This book is the product of an archive Kohner spent a lifetime amassingin order to learn about her family. It will no doubt form a cornerstone for future generations wishing to learn about her.
