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I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust by Mathias B. Freese March 23, 2015March 23, 2015 / readers+writers journal Is there a book big enough to elucidate or explain genocide on a mass scale? We can read about facts and figures, but the human toll is impossible to take in all at once. If there is any way to understand the mass murder of millions of human beings, it is in small doses or glimpses of the horror from the viewpoint of individuals. Snapshots of genocide, rather than great, over-arching tomes that seek to explain the inexplicable.  The most effective works of art about…

I truly Lament is a unique and remarkable compilation of 27 Holocaust stories. Each story explores different points of view, concepts and theses all corresponding to the Holocaust. The stories take the reader on a deep, psychological and profound emotional journey into the stark reality of what it was like to live, exist or to die in the inhumane conditions of the concentration camps run by the Nazis. In the opening chapters the stories deal mostly with the plight of Jews in concentration camps that have no choice to endure the cruel and unjustified punishments of the prison guards who…

Stephen Feuer,who is the publisher of Gihon River Press in Pennsylvania,  informed me that Joanne Gilbert’s new book Women of Valor  had just been published by his press. He asked me if I was willing to review it and I declined.  However, we agreed that I would send him I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust, a collection of short stories, which was recently published and he would give me Women of Valor, a sharing among brethren. Without the pressure of having to review the book, I read with no preconceptions. As a historian Gilbert is well-versed with the Holocaust, much more than knowledgeable and her opening…

This classic joke by Berle: “Anytime somebody orders a corned beef sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise, somewhere in the world, a Jew dies.” How far can we read into this, what are the manifest and latent aspects of it? For some nagging and still non decipherable reason I feel it says something to what I am experiencing with the marketing of my book, I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust. Only a few days ago a blogger responded to my query with this stark sentence: “I don’t read Holocaust books.” In my fantasy I wanted to sentence her to writing this lunacy…