I TRULY LAMENT
5.0 out of 5 stars
`When you’re dead, Ezra, I’ll tenderly throw you into the pit and say a few words over you.’, October 18, 2014
By
Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) – See all my reviews
This review is from: I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust (Paperback)
Mathias B. Freese is a writer, teacher, and psychotherapist. His recent collection of essays, “This Mobius Strip of Ifs,” was the winner of the National Indie Excellence Book Award of 2012 in general nonfiction and a 2012 Global Ebook Award finalist. His “I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust” was one of three finalists chosen in the 2012 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest out of 424 submissions.
Were Mathias B. Freese not such a gifted writer this book might become overbearing after a few stories. But the compassion and the ability to stand in the vantage of the speakers recalling the Holocaust is truly a profoundly moving experience. These stories ache and peel back the yellowing seal of time that disuse allows to settle over unrepeated truths and places us in the concentration camps, living (or surviving or enduring or not) along side fellow `detainees’. Freese makes us feel, smell, cringe, and cry as these arias are sung from the stage of hate created during WW II.
It is only by being placed there via the time capsule Freese provides that reminds us of the horror of this hideous blight on the face of humanity. Only then can we ever avoid its recurrence – or be more objective as we see the genocide and human trafficking and other brutalities that somehow become hidden in our newspapers. This is a book that should be in the hands of everyone, in all countries, of all beliefs, of all living survivors from that time, with the plea this never happens again. Grady Harp, October 14
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