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Article in the
New Jersey Jewish News by Larry Bernstein How does it feel to be left alone as
a seven year old. Your mother is taken by the authorities and your father is
away in an interment camp and you are left in a cherry orchard in southern Levendel gives us insights into the workings
of What I found most interesting is the
description of his emotions about his mother and the description of her
actions are sometimes inconsistent. He shows her virtues and her flaws. He writes about her love, her intelligence, her caring, her
stubbornness, her bad judgment in not
fleeing sooner, her mistake not
taking all her money with her, and then going back to get it. I got the whole picture of her and that
makes the book rich and touching. Levendel describes the peasant family
that adopted him. They were heroes who
risked their lives to help. Some scatological material gives us an earthy
feeling of these people struggling to feed themselves as they helped others
and thought nothing of it. They were
truly pious. l loved how Levendel writes about his experience during
allied bombings, "The bombardment did not feel or sound like it does in the
movies. The heavy smoke smelled like
dust and fire. The explosions were
much more violent that I expected. The
earth trembled under my body, and I could feel the shock wave of the
explosions on my neck and chest, as if the bombing were happening inside my
shirt. There was nowhere to hide. My
mother had reached the limits of her power and could do nothing more to help
me." The tracing of the official Larry
Bernstein |