Recent decades have seen an outpouring of literature about the tragic destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War. Yet virtually nothing has been published about the astounding process of healing and recovery undergone by many survivors of the Holocaust, who had to overcome unspeakable personal trauma to build successful new lives. The present book, written with sensitivity and eloquence by the loving son of two such people, breaks important new ground in describing and shedding light on this remarkable ...
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Recent decades have seen an outpouring of literature about the tragic destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War. Yet virtually nothing has been published about the astounding process of healing and recovery undergone by many survivors of the Holocaust, who had to overcome unspeakable personal trauma to build successful new lives. The present book, written with sensitivity and eloquence by the loving son of two such people, breaks important new ground in describing and shedding light on this remarkable phenomenon. The story follows Bela and Judit Rubinstein as they return from the camps at the end of the War, their families having been murdered by the Nazis. They flee Hungary and end up trapped in a refugee camp in northern Italy. Finally, an unforeseen opportunity arises to immigrate to Canada. The Rubinsteins establish a new home, raise a family, and integrate into the Toronto community. The book's universal message of hope is sure to inspire a broad range of readers.
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Add this copy of An Italian Renaissance: Choosing Life in Canada to cart. $17.93, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Dallas rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 2010 by Urim Publications.
Add this copy of An Italian Renaissance: Choosing Life in Canada to cart. $51.26, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2010 by Urim Publications.
I have reviewed countless books, but never in the form of a letter to the author. Then again, never have I read a book quite like yours.
Were we to classify your book for the Library of Congress, it would, no doubt, fall under standard categories. 1. Holocaust. 2. Memoir. 3. Béla (Dov), Judit, Robert Rubinstein. Save for the family names, thousands of other books could be classified the same way.
Yours, however, is different.
Yes, you tell the story of your parents. Each was taken by the Nazis in Hungary in 1944, then subjected to great suffering, not least the loss of most of their families. They met after the war, married and built a new life in Canada.
Your retelling of this trajectory is different -- first, in your somewhat incongruous title, Italian Renaissance. It alerted me to something beautiful between your parents' Nazi period and Canadian period. With your subtitle, "Choosing Life in Canada," it was clear that your book had nothing to do with the historical Renaissance; rather, it turns out, with a small town near Torino in northern Italy, Grugliasco. Grugliasco became the site of your parents' "renaissance."
To get the hint, I had to read quite far into your book. But even before that, I saw your book was different for a more important reason: You do not round the edges.
Of course, in any Holocaust memoir, one expects rough edges, but only about the Nazis and what they did, or forced Jews to do. Your rough edges open up a more subtle landscape, by turns difficult and rewarding. You probe the inconvenient truths about what some survivors did to themselves, and other truths, quite beautiful, about how others refashioned themselves.
You probe what your parents, each in a different way, told themselves in order to survive their survival.
Most admirably, you probe yourself. You not only collect the incidents and stories and stray documents and slices of conversation that enable you to piece together your parents' history, you subject them to a critique. I must confess, I stand in awe of the unfailing and uncompromised honor you pay your parents, alongside your relentless pursuit of the truth. Quite a combination! You love the story they wove for you, and never flinch from searching for corroborating evidence, which you do not always find. Sometimes, you find the opposite, disproving evidence.
I must further confess, you mystify me. Whence did you summon all of your scholarly skills? How did you learn to suspect, identify, and explain a perhaps subconscious move by your mother to embellish one of her most moving, indeed wrenching, tales of survival? Although you do not say precisely what it is you do for a living, you clearly are in business. I assume you followed in the footsteps of your parents' successful real estate business. How did you acquire the training of a scholar -- the scepticism, the thoroughness, the instincts, the literary grace?
You bring an overwhelming empathy to all of your sources -- both human and documentary -- without diluting your capacity for dispassionate evaluation. When the subject is one's own parents, this is doubly remarkable.
I had to write you directly to express my admiration.
When I first read in your introduction -- "To the extent that my insistence on candor may upset certain people, I express regret, but I offer no apology" -- I didn't get it. Having completed your embracing yet unflinching effort at biography, memoir, history, self-scrutiny, and piety, I am impressed.
Grugliasco held a former all-female psychiatric hospital, converted into a Displaced Persons camp for Holocaust survivors, run by the UN.
Your parents were eternally grateful for the shelter and meals they received, gratis, in Grugliasco.
Their gratitude, as you point out, itself was predicated upon a level of healing. Not everyone healed. Your rough edges are unvarnished.
You write: Your mother was proposed to by her uncle. He was about as old as her father (dead in Auschwitz). It was all very simple for your uncle. He needed a spouse, your mother needed a spouse, so why not marry? Your mother, alone, bereft, broken, had the courage to say no.
Her uncle never spoke to her again.
You write: Eva, a friend of your mother, lost her husband in Maidanek, so she remarried. Her husband was much older than she, and they had almost nothing in common.
One fine day, Eva's first husband, Marek, showed up -- unbelievably, he had survived the gas chamber. She abandoned her second husband and two children, exultant. "Alas, Marek was no longer the person she had known and loved. His harrowing concentration camp experiences had thoroughly traumatized him, rendering him manic depressive and abusive. In truth, Eva was not the same person she had been six years earlier, either."
In two weeks, she was back in Grugliasco with her new family.
Rough edges.
Two friends, separated during the war, enjoyed an emotional reunion in Grugliasco. She became pregnant. The anticipation was overwhelming. But she died in childbirth, the baby survived, the father collapsed emotionally, the baby's aunt took him to France to raise him. You write: "Every person in the camp felt the agony of the disconsolate father."
You make it clear: As much as it was love, or in many cases less than love, marriage was an imperative in order to procreate, to defeat Hitler, to recreate the Jewish people. Pregnancy, however, was easier to achieve than happiness, not to mention normalness.
Still, you make clear, Grugliasco was, for most of the 3,000 displaced persons there, a healing center. Paradoxically, this was in part because of the enforced idleness. Your parents and their fellow Holocaust survivors wanted to return to normal life, to be productive, to work, to do something. They hated doing nothing, but in the economically devastated post-war Italy, they were forbidden to seek jobs.
The way you read it, your parents' involuntary and extended vacation was really an opportunity to allow them to return, gradually, to normal routines, to get past their demons to some degree, at least.
You write -- again, I quote you, because, you see it and say it better than anyone else:
"My mother has often remarked that she is not sure how well the members of the group would have managed had they been given the opportunity to return to living a normal life right away. At the time, all they could think about was how irritated they were to be trapped in such a dreadful place after the torments they had just recently endured. In retrospect, it proved a great blessing that the survivors were granted this transitional breathing space before having to readjust to life in the outside world."
An Italian renaissance.
And G-d? How did your parents square their fate with their faith? About your father, you tell us little, because he spoke little, in fact almost never, about the Holocaust. Your mother was just the opposite.
In my mind, your father was the Ben Doliner of my experience, and your mother was the Fred Englard of my experience. Doliner, a survivor, never said one word, yet after he died his basement was found stocked to the gills with canned food, lest he need to barricade himself again. This time, he would be prepared. Englard who, like your mother, was a survivor of Auschwitz, never stopped talking about the Holocaust in virtually every conversation I had with him over the course of a quarter of a century.
Your mother was gripped by a "deep spiritual malaise." Her "instinctive reaction" to it, you tell us, "was to yearn for the stability and contentment she had known in her parents' traditional Jewish home.
"After marrying Bela, she decided to focus on taharas hamishpachah, literally `purity of the family.' Jewish law required a married woman to immerse herself in a mikvah, a ritual bath, every month following her menstrual cycle. If Sabbath observance was rare after the War, adherence to taharas hamishpachah was virtually non-existent . . . Ea
Marjorie Blende
Apr 21, 2012
Tender, honest, filial love
Considerable time elapsed after the Shoah before its survivors, in the main, could speak about their experiences even to their children, let alone publicly.
Those who were able did find ways to separate memory from nightmare and talk or write openly, if painfully, to the world about what they had witnessed or, worse, experienced. Though even they, in doing so, would never be able to lift the heavy, leaden stones from their hearts.
Today, more than 6-1/2 decades after the war, a considerable number of survivor memoirs have been published. Indeed there are even public foundations, such as the Azrieli Foundation, that encourage and assist survivors to write their personal stories.
Children of the survivors, too, have written about their parents' experiences. Many, if not most, of these next-generational works have focused on the emotional disability and the resulting familial dysfunction that the war wrought. Often, the narrator tries to explain but always also escape from, and not help carry, the burdens borne by his or her parents.
An Italian Renaissance: Choosing Life in Canada (Urim Publications), by Robert Eli Rubinstein, is also a book by a child of survivors about his parents' experiences. But it is unlike most 'second-generation' works.
It is not a memoir of survivorship; it is not a chronicle of horror and rescue; nor is it a self-obsessed exculpation of personality disorder.
An Italian Renaissance is a thoughtful, purposive reflection about the experiences of the author's parents before, during and after the Shoah, a near-philosophical exploration of history, memory, facts, truth, character, human strength and human frailty.
Rubinstein writes tenderly, yet always honestly, about his parents. He reconstructs, as best he can in the circumstances, pieces of a broken narrative into an unbroken story without embellishment. He reconciles truth with memory without concealment.
"I believe in honesty even when it hurts", the author told the CJN at his north Toronto office. Quiet and reserved, soft-spoken and precise, Rubinstein has a commandingly authoritative presence. "Things are not always what they seem. I accepted my mother's stories in childhood quite uncritically. Not everything I was told, I subsequently found out, was accurate."
"Truth can be a complex matter. Sometimes something may not necessarily be factually accurate, but true nevertheless to the individual, or serve a higher purpose. Survival sometimes requires us to take certain liberties with the truth and what matters is the result, namely, to become successful, good human beings."
Understanding how his parents became successful, good human beings, despite their experiences in the Shoah, is the touching core of the book.
With forthright observations conveyed through straightforward, elegant writing, Rubinstein pays moving tribute to his parents. This is clear from the dedication page of the book.
"There are parents for whom
endowing life to their children
is a profound declaration of faith
and an act of soaring courage.
And there are children for whom
receiving life from their parents,
though the most unlikely happenstance,
inspires unbounded love and devotion.
Such are my parents.
And such is their child."
The book takes its title from the fact that Rubinstein's parents spent the immediate postwar period as refugees from Hungary in a displaced persons' camp in Grugliasco, northern Italy, near Turin (Torino). The author was born in Torino during his parents' internment in Grugliasco.
"Italy represented the spiritual rehabilitation of my family", Rubinstein writes. In a profoundly symbolic and actual sense, Italy was where his parents were reborn. It was where their souls began to heal in preparation for the next phase of their lives, which was to be in Canada.
"For me, Italy was the key to all the blessings that subsequently befell my family", Rubinstein writes of an earlier stage in his life. True to his loyalty to honesty, the book depicts Rubinstein''s determined testing of that key, seeing which far-past chambers of his family's painful story it really unlocked.
"The book was a long time in the making. Everything was thought out very carefully", Rubinstein emphasized.
"As children of the 20th century, my parents have lived through an astonishing range of transformative events", Rubinstein writes. "The changes my parents witnessed and the challenges they overcame along the way boggle the mind. But never did they lose their moral compass, even in the darkest days when it appeared that the bulk of humankind had done so. The coexistence of such extraordinary adaptability and dedication to principle within a single individual is rare to find. It is a special privilege to be the child of two such individuals and to have had the opportunity to learn from their personal examples."
This is a rare work of filial homage that contains within its pages example and inspiration for us all.