The Journal of Helene Berr

Oftentimes, when one thinks of the Holocaust, images of France are absent from society's collective memory. We tend to visualize eastern Europe, including Poland and Germany, instead of the traditionally Catholic France during discussions of the 6 million Jews who were tortured and murdered by Hitler's henchmen. Helene Berr's journal is a record of the systematic deportation and extermination of the Jews in Paris during World War II.

Helene was a well-educated Sorbonne student who had a talent for literature and writing. As Paris slowly suffocated in the Nazi grip, Helene began to record her observations along with her attempts to make sense of all the suffering she encountered on a daily basis. Helene knew what was ultimately in store for her, so she gave pages of the journal to the Gentile family cook to smuggle them out of the house so she could posthumously share her experiences with the rest of the world.

She had a brilliant mind that was inspired by the books of literature she so loved. Much of the book reads like prose because she has a gift for finding parallels in her life with the characters and plots in her favorite books. Almost sensitive to a fault, though Helene is well-aware it's just a matter of time before she is interned in a concentration camp, her main concern is the well being of her family, friends and orphans she takes care of at the local benevolent society that serves families who were torn apart by deportations. So often, Helene cannot separate her pain from those of others and she personalizes their horrible experiences as her own. The book is full of little vignettes that illustrate the countless little ways the Nazis demoralized the Jews before they were ever arrested for their religion.

Stranger in a Strange Land

I've been reading a lot for work lately, so it took me a few weeks to trudge through this dictionary-sized tome. Robert Heinlein's masterpiece confused the hell out of me. I was on board for the first third of the book, but then the plot went a bit wonky. I say wonky not because I'm a prude or because I was offended, I just couldn't rationally follow Heinlein's train of thought. Of course I understood the critique of modern American mores, riddled with our contradictions and our sometimes absurd lemmingline devotion to organized religion, but I can't quite get how Heinlein went from point A to point B 500-some-odd pages later. Is Michael Valentine Smith a modern incarnation of Jesus? Or an archangel? Or the Martian Hugh Hefner? The version I read was an unabridged edition that included a few hundred more pages than the original. Though a lot of the dialogue is sharp (and borderline obnoxiously chauvanistic at times), it tended to be a bit longwinded, unnecessarily beating a few ideas into the ground. I've managed to intellectually alienate myself from yet another classic novel. ** Sigh ** Maybe I should stick to David Sedaris and James Herriot.