The Binding

by Brenda Barrie

When Dave Razkowski falls from the rock-face hes climbing, hes forced to deal with not only his serious physical injuries, but with the psychological injuries and powerful impact the Holocaust has had... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0983592144
• ISBN13: 9780983592143
• Release Date: October 2012
• Publisher: Gray Matter Consultants LLC
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Secretkeepers in THE BINDING

Brenda Barrie's first novel, The Binding, is a fictional exploration of the ongoing effects of a cataclysmic tragedy in the lives of three families as by chance the sons of three Holocaust survivors meet in South Dakota as the result of a rock-climbing accident one of the characters experiences. Dave Razkowski has gone on his annual solo climbing excursion that he undertakes every year in an attempt to match his survivor father's heroism in enduring life in the Nazi death machine, when he slips and falls hundreds of feet. He is spotted from the air by Wolff Blumen, another son of Holocaust survivors, who is flying a small airplane and notices Dave's broken body lying on the ground. Dave is rescued and taken to the Sioux Falls hospital where Wolff, an aspiring Orthodox rabbi, is the Chaplain. Another child of Holocaust survivors, Al Logan, a television newsman for the local station, gets involved as he sees a potential story that can make his professional career. Thus, the secrets each man harbors, a secrecy rooted in an instinct to survive, begin to unravel. As the story develops, the strategies by which each man - especially Dave - attempt to shield their identities and thereby increase their chances of survival are revealed and explored. While he seems more or less to have come to terms with his own past, Woolf Blumen, the Orthodox Jew, nevertheless fantasizes rescuing Jews by bombing concentration camp rail-lines, and as a child his parents, the survivors, tried to protect him by making him a child actor, somebody with a name not unrecognizably Jewish who is always on the move. In the course of pursuing his story on the rescue of Dave Razkowski, Al Logan (born Alton Lowenthal), driven by professional ambitions on the one hand and his own past on the other, comes to the conclusion that Dave is a Neo-Nazi and tries to root him out, only to discover Dave's real secret. In doing so, Al realizes certain awful truths about his parents and how they were able to escape death in Hungary. The Binding is full of psychological insights, not the least compelling of which is the way victim and perpetrator can become confused. Al Logan is not the only one who sees Dave as a potential Neo-Nazi; Robin McDonald, Dave's common-law wife, a gentile, uncovers her husband's secret Holocaust archives and is prepared to think the worst of him until her neighbor, Tovah Feldner, also a rabbi (and protagonist of the author's next novel, The Rabbi's Husband), convinces her otherwise. This is a novel driven by both plot and character. Any intelligent reader will be charmed after the first two chapters and compelled to read to the end. Readers with a particular interest in the Holocaust will not want to miss this one.

A real page turner

I really was able to connect with the lives of the three couples. The action starts on the first page and pulls you into the story. The theme of how past events even before the birth of the main charactors comes to influence even dominate their lives is very powerfull.