The County of Birches (vuoden 1998 painos)

The book is a set of 14 short stories tied together through being the history of a family of Hungarian Jews who suffered the Holocaust and moved to Canada after the war. The stories are grouped into The Old World, The Grey World, and The New World. They chronicle the early, pre-war splendour of the Weisz family, its destruction in the war through the Holocaust, and the struggle post-war of Sari and Gabor (Apu to his family) to make new lives, with new children: Lili and Dana. Most of the stories after the first few are told through the eyes of Dana. The book holds together so well that I looked to see if it were an autobiography; it is not.

The structure of the book is powerful in its understatement in the sense that it is not didactic, but it makes the losses real, it humanizes the awful number of millions through the lives of one family. Kalman does not set out just to describe once again the horrors of the Holocaust. Instead, she illuminates the deep, almost incomprehensible losses at a personal level through her description of Apu's commitment to remembering and to being a link to the past: the survivor's need to bear witness. All of which makes him an anachronism in the new world where people have never known such horrors and who too easily can be glib about it in the abstract. The book is a description of new beginnings freighted with a past that was wonderful, but then turned terrible, and the pressures that this imposes not only on Sari and Apu, but much differently, and not without generational and sibling conflict, on their daughters who grow up with the knowledge, but not the direct experience, in a totally different society. It illustrates the power of the life force, but at the same time, the dedicated effort that is required to remember, or even to try to understand.

A passionate voice in fine writing. I'm pleased to have made the acquaintance of Judith Kalman.