Leon H. Gildin

From Lilac Wolf and Stuff

I really wasn't sure what to expect from this book. The cover is simple and appealing, so I was initially intrigued. The story is captivating. It's about a fairly small Jewish family living in Israel. The story is told from Sholom's point of view for most of it, but Anna, Josef and Liese join in as well. (You'll have to read the book to find out who those people are.)

Anna and her husband are both survivors of the Holocaust in Poland. They were housed in the Hotel Polski where they met and also lost their spouses and children. Just thinking about that makes me want to sob. Can you imagine your little ones ripped from you, knowing that they would likely be killed? But she survived, and her and Chaim married and had children of their own.

Sholom is their oldest and he was working on his doctorate thesis on the Hotel Polski. What he uncovers will change his family forever. (That's good, right? Makes you want to rush out and read it?)

The story itself is captivating. I really couldn't put it down. But that being said, there was too much emphasis on the dialogue. Lots of he said this, she said this, then she told him that. It made the flow fairly awkward. And they ate ALL THE time. I also felt the relationships were unrealistic. Lots of embracing and kissing that just didn't seem appropriate. I can't really share an example, I don't wish to reveal too much of the plot. I just want to warn you that even though it is a fascinating tale, and I would recommend giving it a go, sometimes it's unpolished and waffling.

This book is a sequel to The Polski Affair, but you can read this without reading the other one first. There is some adult language but for the most part the book stays clean. The story really rushes through any kind of activity going on. There was a war in this story and he breezed through it in a couple of pages. The main character was in the war, and it was still completely glossed over.… (más)

About:
The Family Affair is the sequel to the intriguing book, The Polski Affair. This book takes place some two years after the first book.
Anna continues to try and move on with her life as a Holocaust survivor. It has been decades since she was living in the Warsaw ghetto and her family was murdered. Anna still deals with her feelings of survivors guilt. She has since remarried and her children are now adults with children of their own. As fate would have it, her son Sholom is doing his doctorate thesis on the Hotel Polski and has decided to do visit the hotel itself as part of his research.

In the previous book, Sholom met with ex-Gestapo Colonel Peter Hauptmann against Anna's wishes. Anna was Hauptmann's mistress in the previous book.
In The Family Affair secrets are uncovered, some good and others not so good, but these characters continue to strive and move forward. New characters emerge in this book and they are all somehow intertwined.
It's a story about enduring long after the war has ended and coming to terms with the past in order to move on.

My thoughts:
I was interested as to what would happen to these characters after reading the first book.
I especially liked Sholom's character. I felt like he had a strong spirit and I liked seeing things come full circle as he visited the hotel and sat in the same dining room where his parents had eaten so many years before. It is because of Sholom that certain truths are unveiled. Once he sets off to do his research, the story takes off.

I enjoyed The Polski Affair moreso than The Family Affair. My one qualm about The Family Affair is the way one character, Josef, is frowned upon for being a Catholic priest. I just felt like comments kept cropping up here and there referring to his vocation in a negative light. They all accepted him as family even though he was Catholic, that type of thing. I'm not one to nit pick, but the characters feelings towards Josef's priesthood irritated me a bit. On the other hand, I could somewhat understand where these characters feelings were coming from, especially given everything they had been through.

Another new character to come into the story is Hauptmann's daughter. She is anti-semetic and I found this an interesting twist to the plot.
Meanwhile Hauptmann himself is a multi-faceted character, which I was not expecting. Even though he was a Nazi in the past, he does try to redeem himself somewhat.
I found Anna's feelings towards Hauptmann to be intriguing until the very end. He is this huge part of her life, whether she wants him to be or not.

Overall, The Family Affair was a good read. I think these books need to be read in order to get a feel for these characters and the storyline.
I recommend these books to those interested in Historical Fiction and Holocaust stories. Although revolving around the Holocaust, these books are not gruesome, they are moving and inspirational.… (más)

About:
The Polski Affair is an engaging novel that quietly drew me into its pages and left me feeling both shock and sorrow.
For a short book, this story packs a punch and is actually hard to review mainly because there are a few different things going on in the storyline.

Anna Adler is a Holocaust survivor living in Israel. The book goes from flashbacks to when Anna was incognito at the mysterious Hotel Polski to present day. Anna's first husband and her children were killed by the Nazi's. She is sent to the Hotel Polski disguised as a Polish maid in order to find out any information she can about what is going on there. There are all kinds of rumors surrounding the hotel.

While at the hotel, Anna meets a man named Chaim. He has also lost his family and the two of them bond quickly and fall in love.
One day, Anna is unexpectedly confronted by a Colonel who in charge of the Hotel Polski. He makes her his personal servant and Anna cannot refuse for fear of her life as well as Chaim's.
The Colonel is named Peter Hauptmann and he treats Anna as decently as can be expected. As the months pass, the two have an illegal affair.
When the Colonel is reassigned, he makes arrangements for Anna and Chaim to be sent overseas with new identities.
Years later after the war is over, Anna has never forgotten the Colonel and one day she is called upon to testify at the International War Crimes tribunal about his role at the Hotel Polski. Anna's past seems to forever haunt her.

An invitation has also been sent out for the 'guests' who survived Hotel Polski to come reunite and perhaps find closure.

My thoughts:
I had no idea what to expect when I began reading The Polski Affair. What I found here is an interesting take on an actual hotel where events were never fully reconciled.
The first part of the book took off a tad slowly for me. I think it was slow mainly because I was getting used to the flashbacks and the main characters. However, once the story took off, I was up late into the night reading.
I was shocked that Anna was made to be a Nazi's mistress. And even more stunned that she began to have feelings for him, especially after how her husband and children were murdered.
At the end of the book she does make a speech to her son where she justifies her actions a bit, as best as she can. I liked that she did that, it made me like her character a bit more.

The characters are interesting and the book is well written. This book is set during an atrocious time in history and I think the author did a good job at bringing these characters to life. The Holocaust survivors wonder why they survived, while so many did not, including their own loved ones.

There is one scene where a group of people, children included, are rounded up by the Nazi's and taken by train supposedly for 'freedom'. While on board, all the windows are covered with sheets so they cannot see where they are going. I found that scene bone chilling, just the thought of being at someone elses mercy like that.

I should mention there are some brief sexual scenes in the plot. I found those unexpected, but they fit in well with the storyline.

I enjoyed reading this one and when it was finished, I did wonder what would happened next.… (más)

When the Warsaw ghetto was destroyed in 1943, the surviving Jews fled to the countryside or hid in the homes of sympathetic Aryans. In an elaborate scheme to encourage Jewish citizens to come out of hiding, the Gestapo promised to allow Jews from Warsaw who held foreign passports of neutral countries to leave Poland and travel to South America where they could find refuge. They used the Hotel Polski to house Jewish families who were preparing to emigrate. Nearly 2500 people came out hiding and moved to the Hotel Polski. Instead of finding safe passage out of Poland, Jews were instead transported to Vittel, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz when their passports were not recognized by South American governments. Jews without foreign passports were executed by the Germans at Pawiak prison. Only about 350 Jews who held Palestinian passports survived.

It is this historic event which serves as the backdrop to Leon Gildin’s novel The Polski Affair.

I was eager to read this book – the premise seemed promising and the novel won the 2010 International Book Award for Historical Fiction. Despite my high hopes, I found myself quickly disappointed. The narrator is a woman by the name of Rosa Herzog. She represents one of the few survivors of the Hotel Polski and tells her story in a dry voice, relating the events but lacking any real emotion. Her narrative bounces around quite a bit. Because of this, I felt largely unmoved by her story which read more like a history book than a first person narrative of a tragic event. I was distracted from the story repeatedly because of glaring typos and poor grammar (for example, on page 7 a sentence reads: “Just like Chaim and I.“). I could forgive one or two mistakes, but after stumbling over these types of sentences for 51 pages and finding my mind wandering, I finally put this book aside as one of the rare DNFs of the year.

I wanted to like this one, but I am afraid it is one of those self-published manuscripts that could have benefited from tighter editing.

Not recommended.

Unrated.… (más)