Man of Ashes (Texts and Contexts)

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About Man Of Ashes

Product Description Salomon Isacovici was born to a farming family in western Romania. One day in 1940 his family woke as Hungarians, renationalized overnight by the changing borders of World War II. To other Hungarians they were Jews, and week by week their world grew worse. In 1944 the Germans arrived and Isacovici, his family, and every other Jew from his town were pushed into cattle cars and taken ever closer to the soot and smoke of Auschwitz. He became a man of ashes. Man of Ashes was first published in Mexico in 1990 as A7393: Hombre de cenizas and was awarded the Fernando Jeno Prize. The English translation has been thoroughly revised in collaboration with Salomon Isacovici. From Library Journal In this moving memoir, first published in Spanish in Mexico in 1990, Isacovici writes of his youth spent on a farm on the border between Romania and Hungary. After the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, Isacovici experienced the horrors of the destruction of Jewish life in Europe: ghettos, forced marches, transports, and death camps. Upon returning to his hometown of Sighet (also that of Elie Wiesel) at war's ending, Isacovici decided to leave Europe and, after a few years in Paris, settled in Ecuador with his future wife. The author recounts beautifully his search for God and life's meaning in the midst of catastrophe. Recommended for Jewish studies collections.?Gene Shaw, NYPL Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews Distinguished by geography as well as by its painful testimony, Isacovicis (d. 1998) memoir was first published in his adopted country of Ecuador. Like Elie Wiesel, Isacovici came from Sighet, Romania, and it took longer for the Holocaust to reach that far east. The comparison with Wiesel ends there, as we get mundane phrases like ``my tenacious desire to survive''; otherwise, the co-author and the translator have done an admirable job with the unearthly suffering depicted here, and the unusual psychological self-awareness of the survivor. Isacovici, typically, has few theological insights about the momentous events he lives through, but there are a few reflective philosophical moments. The authors peaceful childhood was already rocked by a sense of evil learned from predatory owls and a destructive flood. And while life with his large farm family was otherwise uncomplicated, young Salomon had already learned to smuggle to get ahead. Much of the memoirs early drama involves the creeping Nazi threat opposing the Jews wishful thinkingthat the war might be ending and that it cant happen here. The residents of the authors town heard blood-curdling testimonies from Polish refugees, tales of massacre and rape. Only a few other memoirs document such breaks from the Nazis code banning sex with non-Aryans, and, together with descriptions of the brothels at Auschwitz and the kapos as often being released prisoners ``who slept with young boys chosen from among the prisoners,'' the memoir offers these more unique bits of historical significance. The authors family is shattered in Birkenau, but he survives Auschwitz with jobs peeling potatoes and mining coal at Jaworno, and he survives a gruesome death march as the Soviets advance. Isacovici is able to rejoin two brothers in a fruitless return to the family farm and to many European cities in search of a haven. He then joins the family of a woman with whom he has a serious romance, who end up with visas for Ecuador, where he feels an empathy for the suffering of the local Indians. Above average in the torrent of Holocaust memoirs, this account tells an unforgettable and unique story. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review "A poignant, groundbreaking memoir that links the Holocaust and its aftermath to the safe haven that opened for camp survivors in Latin America at mid-century. The controversy surrounding the collaboration between Isacovici and Rodríguez remains an extraordinary opportunity to reflec