Violins of Hope

James Grymes
Violins of Hope

Harper Perennial, 2014

The history of the Holocaust in violins - you can describe the contents of this book with this sentence. In six chapters (with a prologue and epilogue) Grymes tells the stories of six violins, and, most importantly, their owners in the days when the Nazis came to power, and during the Second World War. Link between these stories is a violin collector, Amnon Weinstein, who originally made violins and became engaged in their repair, and then went over to collecting them. He created a program in the memory of the victims of the Holocaust called Violins of Hope.

All violins, which will be in the center of the book stories, were in his collection, he also later began collecting stories about these violins. Amnon’s parents in time fled Nazi Germany and escaped to Palestine. Amnon’s father Moshe was a violinist, repair master and music teacher. In Palestine, it was difficult to make a living playing music and giving musical lessons, and Moshe went into commerce, thinking that that thousands of Jews would flock to Palestine with their instruments, and it would be a profitable business, to repair violins.

He gave gis craft to his son, who carefully preserved hundreds of violins that waited for their owners, or at least relatives of the deceased owners.

Grymes starts the history of violins in Nazi Germany from the beginning of the thirties.

Violins of Hope is one of those non-fiction books about people that does not pretend to be fiction. Stories told here speak for themselves, in any language and need no preening. Author Grymes is concise and academically calm. All that happened happened, history has shown what’s what, all sides are known, and there is no need to put pressure on the reader with pity or preaching.

This book is especially good in that: you soak in the will to live, and the author does not even cries till the sore throat to achieve that the whole story come down to us. Grymes has a clean style, and the book even has footnotes.

Musical instruments from the book’s title are only mediums, not violins for the sake of violins. This book is about people, not about violins or music, unless it’s the music of pain and suffering. Violins saved lives and helped to survive and overcome the difficulties almost non-human. At the same time the violin is an an occasion to tell the stories of people, almost all of whom were not even professionals. The whole project "Violins of Hope" allows you to look at the Holocaust at unexpected angles.

The choice of characters in the book, probably, was not accidental. The author would like to give the widest range of victims of the Holocaust, and it worked. Grymes, of course, could not ignore the largest concentration camps with their orcestras, which are known to the public now, and at the same time, Auschwitz and Birkenau are given only one chapter. This is surprising, of course.
Grymes made a large geographic sample, this is another advantage of the book. Here are an almost unknown refugee camp in Mauritius, and the atrocities of the Romanians, and Ukrainian partisans, and Nazism in Norway. As they say, all the facets of fascism.

Grymes easily controls the general historical information. The book is rich in a variety of facts. In Germany during the war there were chemical plants, which produced condoms for the army, and they were called "Sanitary Articles." In Palestine, the Arab uprisings put pressure on the British government as to limit visas for Jews. Those Arabs even blew a ship with refugees, fortunately, the number of deaths was minimal. By the end of the war the heads of the concentration camps almost lost their minds and asked to play the "Internationale."

In addition to these small facts, Grymes is generous with the historical background. Each story is accompanied by a briskly written historical information about the country, a concentration camp atrocities of the Nazis and their allies - so the book becomes a treasure trove of information. In a concise and accessible way, we obtain all the necessary information, which helps to better understand the history of a hero.

The book became a pleasant surprise. Subtle, clear, on the point - and touching, of course.

In Paradise

Peter Matthiessen
In Paradise

Riverhead, 2014

The novel tells the story of a weekly pilgrimage, when in 1996, at Auschwitz 140 people gathered to meditate, pray and remember the victims of the concentration camp. Among those who are stationed in the barracks where they SS officers once lived are priests and children of Nazis, relatives of dead Jews and elderly camp survivors, researchers and scientists. One of the pilgrims is the protagonist, 55-year-old academician, American scientist Clements Olin studying poetry of victims of concentration camps and composing poetry collections. Although Olin has devoted much of his life to studying the Holocaust, he can not say he has any special knowledge. You can not be an expert on the subject, if you personally weren’t at a concentration camp as an inmate.

Olin convinces himself that he came to Auschwitz to gather material for a book, but this is only a formal reason. The protagonist himself is not sure who he is and what he wants from his pilgrimage. Not sure and the rest of group. Every day they are gathering to pray, inspect dilapidated buildings, railroad tracks, ovens and gas chambers, talk about themselves and their stories, which led to the retreat.

The participants discuss a variety of topics, from religion and patriotism to Jews and Nazism. Every day some new topic is raised that leads to bitter disputes and discussions, considering how different the audience gathered at the camp site is.

In Paradise is an uncomfortable novel. It’s uncomfortable for everyone, the reader, and the heroes of the novel. Holocaust requires sensitivity. Holocaust does not recognize the hypocrisy, but tearful and compassionate feelings are also irrelevant. When faced with such a monstrous crime against humanity, you are inevitably lost, so literally you can not understand who you are.

Olin’s personality is revealed in the novel not immediately: the first few chapters Matthiessen presents us the main character as an outsider, a stranger. The mystery of personality is one of the main themes of the book. Every pilgrim in the novel reveals oneself thus as he wants. Everyone has prepared beforehand the reason for his pilgrimage, but the reason is most often contrived. The pilgrims either do not know or do not want to know the true reason.

Discomfort is a basic feeling the book causes in the first half. Minor characters one after another raise important issues related to the war and the Holocaust, and these themes in any other society or any other place would never have been touched, they are so painful and uncomfortable. But at the ruins of Auschwitz pilgrims have nowhere to go, and they came to pay tribute to the victims, and to understand something that worries and haunts them. Reading a novel, you feel yourself like one of the pilgrims who hear other people's speeches, noting courage of ones and hypocrisy of others. And along with Olin you can only agree that without being a direct participant in the tragedy, you do not have the right to an opinion and can’t add anything new.

The first half is full of suspense and verbal sparring but as the second half of the novel begins, it is like a completely separate thing, much weaker than the first. Matthiessen is as if exhausted by the main theme and went on less significant ones. The protagonist suddenly switches from a concentration camp to love affairs, which puts reader in another awkward position. Matthiessen sort of moves the place of the death of millions of innocent people in the area of the love affairs. The hero rational core ( and author’s) is gone somewhere, rationality giving way to feelings.
But it is still possible to forgive the author: lone hero could still feel a craving to another person in such tragic place. Difficult to explain the change of course in the final third of the novel. The author reserves the Holocaust behind, switching on the theme of the Catholic Church. Suddenly priests, insider’s intrigies and topic of pedophilia come to the first row. This turn of events is at least strange.

The final Olin speech before pilgrims also could be questioned. The speech is too staged and puzzling. Olin again loses his rationality, muttering something about "Polish Jews." And though his origins Olin found only here in Poland, this can not be that in 50 years he never thought of his mother. Hard to imagine that such a reasonable man had no idea about his Jewishness, when everything pointed to this.

I’m again feeling uncomfortable: how good first half of the novel was, you’re at discomort to critisize it, but otherwise it is impossible. Verdict: read the first half, skip the second.