Surviving in Silence: A Deaf Boy in the Holocaust, The Harry I. Dunai Story

Customer Reviews:

Slightly long-winded bio stretching entire life..........2004-06-21

I'm sorry, but this book just was not what I expected it to be. Though Harry Dunai did experience the Holocaust as a Jew, his deafness barely entered into it, except to maybe save his life. His typical experience of being sent away to residential schooling in Budapest probably saved his life, since his parents and brothers were collected and sent to the gas chambers.

Dunai's life was not easy by any measure, but he had many protectors and many people who cared for him and did so much for him in the way of providing homes and jobs. I don't know if it is the translating of Dunai's own words through his daughter and ghostwriter, but Dunai comes across as a very self-centered human being, who often does not show either the gratefulness for his blessings and for those who do things for him, nor does he express much concern for others.

Since I've read so many histories and biographies about those who did care on all sides, this one was very disappointing. The section on the war is short...mainly about how hungry he was. A lot of people starved to death...a lot of other people never had the people caring for them nor the opportunities for escaping a horrific existence that Dunai had.

Book Description

Boston Boy is Nat Hentoff's memoir of growing up in the Roxbury section of Boston in the 1930s and 1940s. He grapples with Judaism and anti-Semitism. He develops a passion for outspoken journalism and First Amendment freedom of speech. And he discovers his love of jazz music as he follows, and is befriended by, the great jazz musicians of the day, including Duke Ellington and Lester Young among others.

"This memoir of [Hentoff's] youth should be appreciated not only by adults who grew up through the fires of their own youthful rebellion, but by those restless young people who are now bringing their own views and questions to the world they are inheriting. They could learn from this example that rebels can be gentle as well as enraged and compassionate in their commitment." -- New York Times Book Review

"Nat Hentoff knows jazz. And it comes alive in this wonderful, touching memoir." -- Ken Burns, creator of the PBS series Jazz

"[A] charmingly bittersweet memoir." -- The Boston Globe

"This is a touching book about a painful, wonderful time in Bostonâ€¦I loved it." -- Anthony Lewis

Customer Reviews:

A terrific, short read.......2002-12-01

Nat Hentoff, who later became famous as a writer about jazz and civil liberties, describes his "coming of age" and discovery of jazz in the Boston of the 1940s. A very enjoyable read.

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Holocaust
A boy and his angst
Courageous Convictions
When the Bronx was partly jewish
Jew Boy Is a Brilliant Masterpiece!

Jew Boy: A Memoir
Alan Kaufman
Manufacturer: Fromm Intl
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0880642521

Book Description

Alan Kaufman grew up in the Bronx, the son of a Jewish mother who had survived the Holocaust, her mind badly scarred by her trauma. Growing up under the shadow of his mother's demons, he struggles uncomprehendingly with his Jewish identity, vowing never to become a victim like his mother. In a great bid for freedom from her legacy, he hitchhikes across the U.S. only to summon the phantoms he had sought to escape. His flight, after taking him to a kibbutz in Israel and the Israeli army, returns him to the streets of New York, homeless and an alcoholic, until at last he finds redemption in poetry, the gift that is true to his being.

Kaufman's authentically American voice, with its headlong energy, joy, and sensitivity, calls to mind the best of Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller. “Jew Boy” touches on themes rarely explored in American writing — the pain, guilt, and confusion of American-born children of Holocaust survivors. But above all it burns with the universal humanity of a brilliant writer embracing the gift of life. “Jew Boy”'s fierce passion will leave no reader untouched.

Customer Reviews:

Holocaust.......2004-04-20

Alan Kaufman is a writer who now lives in San Francisco. He grew up in the Bronx in the 1950's. He was involved in some important publications and was one of the people who brought Spoken Word to the public's attention. While traveling all over the world, Kaufman found time to join the Israeli Army. At the same time his writing has always been very important to his life. He was involved with many journals and was known as the editor of the Jewish theme magazine Davka.

He also edited most importantly The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. This is an anthology that traces all outlaw movements in poetry from Whitman to Slam. It is one of the best-known anthologies. Even though Kaufman spent most of his time in New York City, in 1990 he came to San Francisco to join forces with the San Francisco spoken word scene that revolved around Cafe Babar. Kaufman published a book of poems American Cruiser that was one of the highlights of the new scene.

As media attention came unwillingly to spoken word and freedom of speech in 1993 during the San Francisco Poets strike, Kaufman was one of the people at the center of the storm. Along with Gary Glazner, Kaufman helped put San Francisco on the map in terms of poetry slams, activism, and MTV culture. As Kaufman made a place for himself in the literary world, he brought American poets on tour abroad, spreading Spoken Word to Europe and helped many new voices get heard by organizing several readings locally and nationally. Most notable of these was Wordland. At the same time he was dissatisfied. Secretly he worked for years on what would soon become a memoir. Jew Boy is a book about growing up in New York City and being the son of a Holocaust survivor. It is a brilliant book. It is a confession. It reads like a novel of growing up and learning life's lessons, through the eyes of a poet. Jew Boy is an important book for any time, and especially right now, in the world that we find ourselves in after 9-11.

A boy and his angst.......2002-07-30

This book was both fascinating and repellant. It gave me a window into a very male world, and made me ever more grateful that I was born female. Kaufman comes across as unlikable, whiny, arrogant, violent, unstable, rude, and very self-centered. It is of course this focus on himself that made this brutal self-revelation possible; most people would be far too embarrassed to reveal so much about themselves. I found myself wondering how anyone could really be this disgusting and end up a productive, creative, and respected poet--as he has. Obviously, there was more to his life than this memoir tells us. But Kaufman has chosen to skip over the "normal" parts of his life and has given us those which make us think, "I sure don't like this person." Perhaps he is challenging the reader to separate his work from his person (which is pretty interesting, considering he castigates those who do that with anti-Semites Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway). And boy, can he write! His description of playing football, for example, was remarkable poetry-capturing the intensity, the violence, the absurdity, and the fascination of a quintessentially male experience.

Courageous Convictions.......2001-02-25

I applaud Mr Kaufman for having the courage to expose the paranoia, racial distrust and cultural instability associated with Post Holocaust Judaism. My own childhood was similar. Though my parents were never in any concentration camp, they ascribed to a similar type of cultural victimology and I was compelled to be a good example for "my people". I empathize with his bewilderment and fear at doing anything which might rekindle his mother's sense of insecurity and marvel at how he managed to extricate himself from such a traumatic background and restructure his life without guilt. I congratulate the author for having finally escaped a self destructive cycle.

When the Bronx was partly jewish.......2001-01-02

I really enjoyed reading the book. It is a wonderful story, that reads like a novel rather than a memoir. I work today in the same neighborhood were the author spent his childhood, it is amazing to realize how much it changed, but you see also the same ethnic conflicts, and the struggle of different immigrant groups to set a foothold in their new country. I highly recommend the book, it illustrates the journey of a young man to find a path for his life, which he finally finds it in the written word.

Jew Boy Is a Brilliant Masterpiece!.......2000-12-29

Jewish literature has at last found its Jean Jacques Rousseau! Alan Kaufman's Jew Boy breaks the lock-step of modern literature and takes the reader, Jew and non-Jew alike, into a new world! I have never read a book as visionary as Alan Kaufman' Jew Boy. His language is sizzling, his insights razor-edged, his honesty a revelation in this age of knee-jerk political correctness. The author, who is definitely a rebel in the lineage of D.H.Lawrence,Henry Miller, Genet, has made a pioneering effort to create from a Jewish standpoint an authentic autobiographical narrative of self that transcends the culturally indoctrinated, the dutifully historic, the memoiristically ethnic, in favor of a heart-pounding, gut-wrenching, mind-illuminating tale of such profound wonder and tragically hilarious truth that the reader--me--put down "Jew Boy" feeling forever transformed, braver and more joyful for having dared to enter this man's astonishing world.

Jakub's World: A Boy's Story of Loss and Survival in the Holocaust

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Jakub's World

Jakub's World: A Boy's Story of Loss and Survival in the Holocaust
Alicia Nitecki , and Jack Terry
Manufacturer: State University of New York Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

When German troops come to the small village of Be³zyce, Poland, in 1939, nine-year-old Jakub Szabmacher's world is forever changed. At first the humiliations inflicted by the Germans seem small, but the conditions worsen until eventually Jakub's family and much of his village are murdered, and he is sent to various concentration camps in Poland and Germany, where he struggles to survive the terrible conditions of camp life. Finally liberated in 1945 from the concentration camp in Flossenbürg, Germany, Jakub is befriended by American troops and with their help brought to the United States, where he takes the name Jack Terry. Coauthor Alicia Nitecki, whose grandfather was also imprisoned at Flossenbürg, uses Terry's personal memories to tell young Jakub's story, as well as unpublished memoirs, private letters, and interviews with former inmates of the Flossenbürg concentration camp and the townspeople of Be³zyce and Flossenbürg. Part history, part autobiography, Jakub's World offers an anguished young boy's perspective on the Holocaust.

Customer Reviews:

Jakub's World.......2006-08-15

Wonderful story of World War II Flossenburg from a boys perspective. Something we should never forget, very moving story.

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Jew Boy in Goy Town
H. Charles Bluming
Manufacturer: Xlibris Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0738833363

Book Description

This is a story about the rites of passage of a young boy growing up in the Catskill Mountains, an area occupied by the Ku Klux Klan, before it became the "Borscht Belt." The author shares his lusts and loves, his young hopes and dreams, his fears and feats of bravery. He writes of a time when there were no fancy hotels with elaborate meals and famous entertainers. It was a time of small entrepreneurs opening boarding houses to accommodate city folk who could not afford to vacation in hotels. The author looks back nostalgically at the interdependence of siblings despite their rivalries, and the unquestioning love and cooperation within a family struggling to succeed through emergencies, catastrophes, and aggravations. It is a well-rounded history of love, hope and aspirations, and the down-to-earth experiences of dealing with life in the not so long ago past.

Through a Boy's Eyes: The Turbulent Years 1926-1945

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This changed my life.
Mr. Posner speaks
Through A Boy's Eyes
Through a Boy's Eyes

Through a Boy's Eyes: The Turbulent Years 1926-1945
Louis Posner
Manufacturer: Seven Locks Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

This changed my life........2001-02-05

I had the priveledge of hearing Louis Posner speak last year. Not only was he incredibly inspirational, but he was full of life. It was an honor to meet him. Listening to his story changed my life. If anybody is thinking about buying this book, don't hesitate. It's worth every penny, plus more. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

Mr. Posner speaks.......2000-03-15

Last year I had the wonderful opportunity to hear Mr. Poser speak. For over an hour I was held spellbound by his enthusiasm, knowledge and ability to encapsulate a period of time in our history that was so devastating to so many people. He has accomplished the same with his book. Writing about his own personal experiences and weaving in historical facts adds a dimension and flavor to that period of time that you can genuinely feel. History and non-history buffs alike will find this book enlightening and thought provoking.

Through A Boy's Eyes.......2000-02-28

I have listened to the author give lectures so I was interested in the book version where he adds details and am very pleased with the result. The content is neither depressive nor heroic. It has a balance as seen from the perspective of an adolescent, alone and hunted by the Gestapo, who has courage and will to survive Auschwitz for two years. I highly recommend it for high school libraries.

Through a Boy's Eyes.......2000-02-25

I realy enjoyed this book. It was delightful to see how the indomitable human spirit can survive. This book is a true inspiration.

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Should've stuck to the topic, IMO
Great story of a great journey

Today I Am A Boy
David Hays
Manufacturer: Soundelux Audio Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette

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ASIN: 155935352X

Book Description

At the age of sixty-six, author David Hays is studying, along with a group of twelve-year-old boys, to be a bar mitzvah boy. "Today I Am A Boy" follows Hays on an exciting and life altering experience as he struggles to learn Hebrew alongside his rowdy classmates, whom it nicknames "The Hormone Hurricanes."

Customer Reviews:

Should've stuck to the topic, IMO.......2001-04-12

The topic of this book as stated is highly misleading. Yes, Mr. Hays traces some of his experiences on becoming a Bar Mitzvah at age 66. However, he digresses so much from this theme that it was downright annoying!

I was really looking forward to reading about a 66-year-old man's journey into spirituality and rediscovery of Judaism, rather than a name-dropping autobiography.

What little Mr. Hays did write about his spiritual journey back into Judaism was sparse, and even his way off-topic autobiographical sections didn't include much of his family's, friends',or peers' reactions to his becoming a Bar Mitzvah, which to me would have been very interesting.

He also didn't talk much at all about contemporary Jewish renewal and problems of assimilation and how others might, as he did, find meaning in a religious path they've ignored or rejected.

Why, instead, should I care that he went back for a school reunion and one of his class members won the Nobel Prize? Why should I have to wade through the life stories of some of his uninteresting relatives who are not even marginally part of his spiritual story?

In this catch-all manuscript, Mr. Hays also tangentially subjects the reader to an entire fantasy theatrical piece he has imagined about a grown-up Anne Frank (for which I wouldn't buy a ticket, BTW).

What we also get is too much information and commentary about the 12- and 13-year-olds in his class, including an inappropriate (IMO) dwelling on one of the pubescent girls about whom Mr. Hays admitted over and over he had major sexual fantasies.

Great story of a great journey.......2001-01-02

This is one of those books that you could borrow from your library, or from a friend, but you will likely need to buy your own copy since there are so many passages that are either so wise, so funny, or so meaningfully touching that you will need to use your pencil in order to happily jot checkmarks, brackets, and asterisks throughout the book. I know that I did.

David Hays has a surfeit of academic, personal, and professional accomplishments. In his sixties, he was semi-retired, kids grown, had good health and a happy family life. His mind is unquestioningly fertile (yet organized) and he seems to embrace new experiences. As a child he gazed into a mud bubble, and glimpsed eternity. As an adult he throws himself into the grass in his back yard, in order to look more closely at the earth. His life was full, and meaningful, but he does not brag, and he is likable from the outset.

Rather than rest on his not inconsiderable laurels, he decides to become a Bar Mitzvah, joining a class of local eleven and twelve-year olds - in order to devote himself to study with his congregation's rabbi, Doug, for more than a year. It is this journey - and there is a steady unfolding, with no outburst of religiosity - that forms the starting point for this wonderful narrative.

Hays has an ability to tell you a lot about himself by telling you about other people. He respects himself, and he respects others. He is never boring. His parents, in-laws, grown children, grandchildren, his wide circle of friends and acquaintances, and his classmates are interesting to him, and worthy of reportage. He lets you in on these people and their lives and their histories with unstinting (and never maudlin) respect, even awe. In doing this you find out a lot about Hays and his subjects. Their privacy is never violated, and their dignity is sustained.

There is uncloying, laugh-out-loud humor throughout. Family lore emerges, and it is often funny. Hays delights in his wife Leonora's knack of elegantly summing up a situation with a trenchant malapropism. Of his new-found fervor for religious study, she says, "He hooked, line and sinker!" Of the Bahamas: "It's a third-war country." He also shares his family history, including a terrific (true) story, "How my family saved Israel." His feelings and observations as a sensitive member of his class (of the kids at recess he marvels, "They always know where to go.") - and his relationship with his wonderful rabbi - are a pleasure to watch unfold.

Hays includes a piece on Anne Frank that is dramatic, thoughtful, and not at all funny. It is appropriately included, given that the concerns of an adult approaching his bar mitzvah are different from those of a child. And at one point, he attends a Harvard reunion - which maybe could have been left out of this book, with no loss of substance to this great story.

Book Description

How does a Jewish boy who spent the bulk of his childhood on the basketball courts of Brooklyn wind up teaching in one of the city's pioneering black studies departments? Naison's odyssey begins as Brooklyn public schools respond to a new wave of Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and established residents flee to virtually all-white parts of the city or suburbs. Already alienated by his parent's stance on race issues and their ambitions for him, he has started on a separate ideological path by the time he enters Columbia College. Once he embarks on a long-term interracial relationship, becomes a member of SDS, focuses his historical work on black activists, and organizes community groups in the Bronx, his immersion in the radical politics of the 1960s has emerged as the center of his life. Determined to keep his ties to the Black community, even when the New Left splits along racial lines, Naison joined the fledgling African American studies program at Fordham, remarkable then as now for its commitment to interracial education.

This memoir offers more than a participant's account of the New Left's racial dynamics; it eloquently speaks to the ways in which political commitments emerge from and are infused with the personal choices we all make.

Customer Reviews:

Terrific Book, and Dr. Naison is a Wonderful Person.......2006-06-26

I loved the book -- I read it when it was first published because Dr. Naison was my professor of African-American studies in 1971 at Fordham. He was a terrific professor and the texts in the course were seminal -- I still have many of them to this day on my bookshelf. Anyway, back to this book -- one of the reasons I read it when I found out it was a memoir was to see if I was in it and, in a way, I was. You see, I transferred to another university after my freshman year at Fordham, and in my sophomore year, I got a phone call from Dr. Naison in the hall phone in my dormitory -- I'll never forget it -- he called me to ask me for a date, and this is referenced in White Boy -- not me, specifically, but that he dated a variety of women after his break-up from his long-term lover. I don't remember how long we saw each other -- I don't think it was a very long time -- but I was so flattered and intimidated because I was only 19 and he was 28 at the time, and he was my professor, and he had this marvelous book-filled apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, every aspiring intellectual's dream, and I was that aspiring intellectual. So it didn't work at that time because I was just too young, but for all his fierce leftist radicalism, I discovered that emotionally, he was a sweet, loving, kind and generous man, and his wife is very lucky.

Mike Stalzer FCRH 2002.......2003-01-31

This is wonderful memoir. Much like in his classes at Fordham, Dr. Naison really brings history alive, reminding us that it is more than what you read about in the typical history book, it is about the people that lived it. He gives his life a powerful, emotional, and thoughful voice. For any current and future Fordham University students, I would highly recommend his classes and this book. For everyone else, buy it and see what you missed out when you decided to attend a different school!

Doesn't even deserve a title.......2003-01-26

Just a bunch of racist tripe.

Making Sense of Our Lives.......2002-09-04

Though it deals with his own personal and unique journey, Naison's book helps us all make sense of what our lives have been like since the 60s. The media would like us to believe that those of us who believe in equality, social justice, a real end to racism, and an alternative to corporate capitalism run amock have all disappeared. My personal experience is just the opposite -- our views haven't changed, and indeed, have become more solidified by events of the last decade.

Whether the passion of the 60s will ever reappear in a new guise is impossible to predict. If if does, I feel privileged in knowing that Mark (and so many of my other friends) will be there, if not on the barricades, at least in providing lunch!

White Boy -- Heterodoxy at its Best.......2002-06-05

Naison's gritty narrative takes readers on an odyssey from the multiracial streets of Crown Heights in Brooklyn, New York, where the author spent his wonder years in the 1950s to the vibrant intellectual and activist culture of Fordham University's Black Studies department in the 1990s. In the process, readers learn of the trials and joys this "white boy" faced living a life -- as an activist, lover and teacher -- that transgressed the racial mores of his day. "White Boy," presents an alternative to the standard understanding of "whiteness," which mandates that it be the political and cultural antithesis of "blackness." Naison's book presents a more hopeful picture. Being white and spending 30 years teaching African American studies was not a problem for Naison, or his colleagues at Fordham. He writes, "because we were willing to listen to many voices, and to see race from multiple vantage points, our department provided an intellectual outlet for students of many backgrounds grappling with their racial and cultural identities (...) (W)e created an environment where fighting racism, and exploring the meaning of racial differences, became a moral and political imperative and the center of a vibrant intellectual community" (224-225). Naison's memoir presents an often neglected story in the history of whiteness in America, one where racial difference can help bring different people together instead of constantly keeping them apart.

And just as Naison's life transgressed racial norms, his book defies standards as well. People are reading "White Boy" in places you would never think to see a book published by an academic press: beaches, subways, transit workers' locker rooms, parish offices. Simply put, this in no ordinary memoir.

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The Lost Childhood: A World War II Memoir of a Jewish Boy
Yehuda Nir
Manufacturer: Scholastic
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0439163900

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