Dining with Squirrels

Here’s another one about life long after the Holocaust, but living in its shadow.  Mrs. Reiss wrote the young adult novel The Upstairs Room about her experience hiding in a Dutch farmhouse for over 2 years.  This book takes place in 1969, when she returns — with her small children — to Holland for 7 […]

Beautifully shot, beautifully acted.  Liev Schriber’s screenplay and direction of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel about a Jewish-American college student of the same name who travels to Ukraine to unearth his family’s history during the Holocaust.  Weird combo of gorgeous drama, indie-film comedy, and some magical realism.  I loved it.

Definitely one of the bleakest, most excruciating books I’ve yet read on this subject.  Naomi Samson hides with her mother, brother, sister, and another Jew in the crawl space under a Polish Gentile neighbor’s barn.  FOR TWO YEARS.    They subsist on 2 potatoes a day, delivered along with rants and threats from their petrified and […]