War Story [Large Print]

by Gwen Edelman

Book Overview

Kitty and Joseph meet in a bookstore in New York. She is thirty-two, an aspiring writer. He is sixty, a Viennese Jew, a famous playwright who survived the Holocaust. In a faded bohemian hotel, they... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Large Print: Yes
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1587241463
• ISBN13: 9781587241468
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Wheeler Publishing
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.2" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A Little Book with a Big Punch

Gwen Edelman's thought-provoking War Story is a slim novel filled with enormous themes and two main characters, one who has experienced too much of life, and the other who has only begun to live. Joseph, a 60 year old Jewish playwright and survivor of the Nazis and Kitty, a middle class aspiring Jewish writer about 30 years younger that he fall into a passionate physical relationship after meeting one afternoon in a New York City bookstore. Kitty is immediately drawn in by Joseph's commanding personality and the story he reveals of his childhood eluding death in Europe. Joseph was raised primarily by his mother whose miserable marriage to an unfaithful man rocks his sense of trust early on. In order to protect him from almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis, his mother sends him from their home in Vienna to live with a family in Holland. Joseph, propelled by his wits and comforted by a never-ending stream of sexual relationships with worshipful women, manages to defy the Nazis and eventually emigrate to Israel and the United States. He is enthralled by Kitty's youth and beauty and takes great care in teaching her about his, and what is also her, history. The relationship is doomed because, due to Joseph's past, he cannot trust or fully invest in a relationship with a woman; he cannot engage in any relationship beyond sexual ones for the long term.Kitty, on the other hand, is a Jew in name only. Her parents have never discussed the Holocaust, and have avoided any religious or cultural references to Judaism. Thus, Joseph's story fascinates her. It is only when she presses him him about the future of their relationship tht Joseph bolts. "I am a bird that cannot alight," he says. He does not want to expand the relationship--in fact, he cannot. He must leave America because it is too "new". Kitty is an empty vessel whom Joseph instructs and fills with his wisdom. She balks when Joseph says he has to leave her, becoming angry, clinging to him. After listening to him recite the story of his sad, painful life and admitted limitations, did she really hear him? Or did she hear too well: Is she terrified of loosing the life line of knowledge he is throwing to her?It is the old teaching the young, the victim of the Holocaust teaching the next generation, the experienced explaining the inexplicable. Joseph has suffered and he feels the wiser for it, but his depression and damage are palpable. He needs to drink, smoke and eat to excess while admitting Kitty into his life. He is of another world, his own world, wrapped in a history which, he remids Kitty, she can never really feel because she has never experienced his life. And yet he tells her things she needs to know, things her parents never spoke of. He wants her to know, to be ready, to be safe, and he gives her her history. It is his gift, his own unique expression of love. I did have some difficulty believing the first scene in which Joseph Kruger and Kitty Jacobs (JK and KJ, so near in the alpha

The Corrosive Reach of the War

Gwen Edelman has captured exquisitely the difficulties survivors and victims of World War II face in forming attachments and establishing normal human relations. While THE READER illuminates what is handed down from one German generation to the next, WAR STORY shows one of the most devastating, lingering effects of living beyond the Holocaust: The survivor desperately needs love and acceptance, yet, he or she is left with a basic inability to trust. This reality defines all of their relationships. These two books are part of a growing genre documenting the emotional legacy of World War II.

Compelling First Novel of Love and Memory

I was pulled right into this first novel by Gwen Edelman: a woman alone on a train moving through the winter landscape of Europe while simultaniously moving through her own inner landscape of love, guilt, the Holocaust and the memories of a turbulent love affair. There is an unexpected synergey between the present and another's past, all of it woven together in a seamless narrative. I don't always go for this kind of novel but found myself completely absorbed on the first page and look forward to this writer's next novel. War Story is a smooth and compelling read that I recommend highly.