Three Recent Books (12 cents)

I have read three interesting books in a row. Wow!

1. Vantage Press is a vanity press. That is, it is one of those companies you go to when you want to publish your own book (at your own cost), but want it to look like a real book. These books obviously rarely sell, and their quality varies, but fairly often you find books that are surprisingly interesting. Particularly, memoirs. And a lot of these books are memoirs, the stories of the lives of the author, to be preserved for children and, more often, grandchildren.

The book I picked up is called "The Last of the Numbered Men" and was written by Harry Posmantier, and published in 1984. Posmantier's photograph is on the back cover, and he looks like a typical, normal, average person. He is a plumbing contractor in Skokie, Illinois, which furthers that image. But it is deceptive, because he did not come to the United States until 1957. Until 1948 (through the war), he lived in Poland, spending the last several years in various Nazi work camps, escaping extermination. And from 1948-1957, in Israel.

A normal childhood in Bendin, Poland, with a typical Jewish middle class family. Then, the Germans enter Poland, and he, like many Jewish males, was sent to a work camp, and because he remained fairly healthy, he stayed in the camps for 4 1/2 years. Getting by on his strength, his stamina, and his personality. The stories are interesting, to be sure, and Posmantier gives you a good description of the fellow detainees he comes in contact with, as well as some of the German or Polish guards and townspeople, some of which are quite surprising. For example, a number of camp workers, when they left the camp on days off, would go to see Posmantier's parents (before they were deporting) bringing letters back and forth and CARE packages. At some danger to themselves.

And some other surprising things. He was at a camp at one time which had both Jewish and Russian prisoners. He says that the Russians, when one of their own died, engaged in cannibalism. Is that possible?? And he also gives credibility to the reports of soap made from Jews' body fat, and lampshade, made from human skin. Is that true, or not?

That raises the question, in any memoir of this type, as to how much is accurate and how much hyperbole. Reading through this, you believe everything you read, even the fantastic parts. I have to assume that these books are truthful. And when you read this book having read earlier this year Imre Kertesz' "Fatelessness", you see the similarity of their work camp experience.

2. Ruth Gruber is a well known Jewish reporter, who has written a lot about Israel since before the earliest days of the state. She has written many books, and I believe is still alive in her 90s. I picked up "Ahead of Time", a recent book described as "my early years as a foreign correspondent". The memoir is extraordinary.

Born in Brooklyn to eastern European refugees, her parents thought she was going a long way from home to go to college (at age 15) in Manhattan. But she pursued, studying German language and literature, and winning a fellowship first to the University of Wisconsin (she hitchhiked there by herself) and then to the University of Cologne Germany, where she came into contact with the burgeoning Nazi movement. Obtaining a Ph.D. in English literature in Cologne in one year (a record, particularly since one of her oral examiners was a professor, who was known to hate Jews, women and American), she returned to the U.S., got a job as a journalist, and before she was twenty five, went back to Germany in 1935 (!), to Poland to visit her mother's family (read the book and see what happened in her ancestral shtetl), and to Russia, when she went to the artic regions as the first foreign correspondent in Soviet times. And a second trip to the USSR, this time to Yakutsk in far northeast Siberia.

An unbelievable story that makes you want to look at everything else she wrote and follow her career.

3. The third book was a biography of Caresse Crosby by Washington writer Anne Conover. Another fascinating story, Crosby left her husband to marry Harry Crosby, seven years her junior, and they set Paris aflame in the 1920s, meeting all the creative types in that city at that very creative time, founding the Black Sun publishing house, giving X-rated parties, and (more or less) having a terrific time, until Harry committed suicide. After a while, Caresse comes back to the U.S., and after a short time in rural Virginia, comes to Washington, where she opens a prominent gallery which operated throughout the war years, and continues her publications, fostering new artists and writers from Europe in the immediate post-war years. Then she leaves that part of her life behind, and spends the rest of it trying to foster world peace and world government, coming in contact with another group of prominent world citizens.

All three books are worth reading.

What comes next? Well, I must be on a female biography binge. I am reading a biography of Coco Chanel (she interested me because of questions about her politics during World War II when she was in France), and the autobiography of Susan Strasberg, the original portrayer of Anne Frank, and the daughter of method acting coach Lee Strasberg. So far, both are very engaging.