Two Very Similar, Very Different Books (1 cent)

One is Ben W. McClelland's "Soldier's Son" and the other Arnold Zable's "Jewels and Ashes". Each was written by a talented writer, who was tracing the history of his family. McClelland's father was killed in World War II when McClelland was barely out of infancy; Zable's parents both lived into old age, but they were just about the only survivors of their family, most of whom perished during World War II. McClelland grew up in southwest Pennsylvania, coal country; Zabel in Australia.

I would recommend McClelland's book because he is a very good writer (he is a professor of English and English composition at the University of Mississippi). His mother's struggle to raise a family without a father, and his grandparents and greatgrandparents trials and tribulations in changing America, are not without interest. Small town life in the 1950s and 1960s holds some fascination. But at the end, I had trouble. I couldn't remember one family member from the other, and I had little recollection of most of the stories McClelland told, although I enjoyed reading them very much. But I did not come out of the book very fond of McClelland, so I really didn't care about his stories. For his family members, the book is of course invaluable. For his students, it is proof that their prof can write. But for me and you, I am not so sure. Perhaps I am not being fair.

Zable's book, on the other hand, tells the story of life in Bialystok and surrounding shtetls from before World War I through the Holocaust, and tells the story of the survival of his parents, who were able to leave before the real bad times began. His technique is fascinating. Like Jonathan Safran Foer, he took a trip to recover his parents past. Unlike Foer, he did find traces of their past lives, and did not have to make anything up. And, his trip occurred about ten years prior to Jonathan's, so that he was able to meet more people (speaking in Yiddish and poor Polish) who were alive at the time, although he did not meet anyone who knew personally his parents (some did remember his grandfather, who hawked newspapers and magazines in the main square for decades).

So you follow Zable geographically, and within the geography you go back and forth in time. This works so well in this book. You don't have the same geographic references in "Soldier's Son", and the weaving from recent to deep past, and from realative to relative is more confusing.

And Zable was working with a much broader brush. He was able to put together a detailed history of the twentieth century Jewish experience in Bialystok, down to the last Aktion in 1943, and the "liberation" by the Russians in 1944. So it becomes a book of historical, and not just personal, importance.

I found the McClelland book (published in 2004) on the outside table at Second Story books. The provenance of the Zable book is more interesting; I picked it up at a used book store in Rolla, Missouri, where it was sitting (and it had been inscribed by Zable to 'Freda', apparently a distant relative).