Bronstein's Children

by Jurek Becker

Book Overview

"East Berlin, 1973: an 18-year-old Jew discovers that his father's friends are holding prisoner a former Nazi concentration camp guard in the family cottage. The three older men have handcuffed the ex-Nazi to the bed and are interrogating and torturing him in an attempt to get him to admit to his war crimes. . . . Becker keenly shows the tension between members of the Holocaust generation and their children, who are unable to understand the complexity...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151143501
• ISBN13: 9780151143504
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A complex, compelling read

Becker's Bronstein's Children is (to use a cliche) a compulsively readable narrative. Becker dramatically illustrates the complex relationship between the older and younger generations of German Jews--the older having lived through Hitler's Final Solution and the younger not understanding why the past constantly haunts them. The chapters alternate between the past and the present, showing that history pervades the very being of those Jews living in Germany after the horrors of World War II. The past is omnipresent both for those who lived through it and those who did not but must live with its consequences and try to understand it.