Being a decendant of a Holocaust survivor and also a Warsaw Ghetto survivor this book brough to life the pain struggle and courage that they all went through. This is one of the best books i have ever read and i would recomend it to anyone

A terrific true story of one of the few survivors of the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization) It is very vividly told and I suggest you get it too.

Yitzhak Zuckerman's (Cukierman's) fabulous book stands out in stark contrast to much of the superficial and distorted material that is so often used in Holocaust education. Then again, he was an eyewitness, so he should know. Unlike the anti-Polish slant of most Holocaust educational material, Zuckerman finds much good and bad in both nationalities, and repeatedly sternly warns those who would espouse hatred for Poles. He also has high praises for Zegota, the Polish underground organization that rescued thousands of Jews. Zuckerman is unusually frank and candid in telling the full story of what happened during this cruel time. For instance, Holocaust films invariably show the collaborationist Polish blue police, but not the Jewish ghetto police. Zuckerman, on the other hand, makes it obvious that it was the Jewish collaborationist police which inflicted more of the sufferings on the imprisoned Jews. Most Holocaust materials only show Poles who would betray Jews to the Nazis, while Zuckerman surprises the reader by pointing out that he was just as frequently accosted by Jewish blackmailers as Polish ones. Unlike the movie Schindler's List, which showed a Polish girl cheering as Jews were deported, Zuckerman recounts a diametrically-oppposite personal experience as an incognito Jew (with false documents expertly made by the Polish underground) on the Aryan side of Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was being burned by the Germans, very few Poles rejoiced, and these were primarily from the criminal element. Zuckerman found that many Poles cried as they saw the ghetto burn. Zuckerman also acknowledges that Jews were disproportionately involved in Communism, and this was a major factor which provoked Polish anti-Semitism, including the murder of surviving Jews who returned to reclaim their property after the war. Finally, Zuckerman spends considerable space detailing the many German crimes against Polish gentiles, something which Holocaust materials rarely do in depth, if at all. A superb book!

" I don't think there's any need to analyze the Uprising in military terms. This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army, and no one doubted how it was likely to turn out. This isn't a subject for study in a military school. Not the weapons, not the operations, not the tactics. If there's a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The really important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youths, after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising. I don't know if there's a standard to measure that." -Yitzhak Zuckerman From A Surplus of Memory A Surplus of Memory is Yitzhak Zuckerman's memoir of the events of 1939-1946, the period before, during and after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Zuckerman, or "Antek," his pseudonym in the Jewish underground, was a commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which became the primary fighting force in the Jewish ghetto. After the Uprising, Antek led clandestine operations in Aryan Warsaw, then commanded a unit of Jewish fighters during the Polish Uprising. After the war, he helped Jews returning from exile in the Soviet Union from death camps, and those emerging from hiding after the Nazi occupation. Antek became a major figure in Brikha, the movement that smuggled Jews into Palestine after the war. He finally immigrated to Palestine in 1947 and co-founded Lohamei Ha-Getaot, the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz where he established a Holocaust museum. He was also a witness at the trial of Adolph Eichmann. Antek was a member of Zionist youth organizations in Poland before the war. At the age of twenty-four after the blitzkrieg stormed through Poland, he risked his life to travel into the Nazi occupied zone with his destination Warsaw, where he had been summoned to teach by Ha Shomer, a Zionist group. His mission was to help sustain the Jewish educational movement. After all was lost, Antek worked around the clock supporting the exodus of resistance survivors from the inferno of the ghetto to the relative safety of Aryan Warsaw where approximately 20,000 Jews were already in hiding. He arranged for transportation and shelter in temporary apartments for the survivors and devised subterranean escape routes though the sewers where he shepherded the survivors of the carnage. Many escaped via this route with Antek, but other tortured souls lost their way and died horrible deaths in the maze, eaten by rats or swept away by torrents. Others escaped through a tunnel to the other side. Antek continued his activities in the underground, in particular organizing a Jewish unit that fought in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war he stayed in Europe and continued to be an advocate for Jewish survivors. A tragic postwar chapter was his rescue mission to the town of Kielce where sixty Jews had been killed, victims of a pogrom. After the war, surviving Jews were met with hostility and violence when they attempted to return to their homes. Antek led a support contingent of Soviet soldiers and Polish government officials to Kielce and transported Jewish survivors to safety in Lodz. Antek also became a leader in the Brikha movement, smuggling Holocaust survivors into Palestine. During the remainder of his life in Israel, Antek told his stories of the Uprising to those on his kibbutz. He admitted that he suffered from a "surplus of memory," thus the book's title, the result of thirty-eight tapes and sixty hours of conversation. The burden of the events and comrades that lived and died with him in the Warsaw ghetto became more vivid with each passing year. He told friends," I feel in my soul that I'm a thousand years old, since every hour there counts for a year in me." . Antek's survival through the Holocaust and telling his Surplus of Memory were perhaps his greatest act of resistance.This is an essential piece of not only Holocaust history, but in the history of humanity's resistance to oppression. It's a tragic, yet inspiring book.

I found Katzir's voice to be refreshing and her stories to be engrossing. It has been a long time since I have read a short story which created such a sense of place and person in a matter of 20 or so pages. Katzir's voice crosses national boundries and I can't wait to get some more! I've been waiting for a friend to return to Israel so she can see if there are more of her books available which are translated into English.

The most powerful aspect of the tale is the viewpoint in which the characters share the inevitable guilt of the reader for watching the suffering without really experiencing it. The jesters are in the concentration camp for being gypsy, dwarfed and hunch-backed, but they are spared to entertain the General's guests. Through their experiences they learn that one can survive most anything for the sake of living another day.

to learn about our father, i had to read his sons book. my father has brought me on a journey into vast spaces that needed him. he has made me understand when i had no one to understand, he came to me in a vision..in a book..in many books, yet he is my father and your his son. thank you for the only book that knows him, we know his thoughts..what is it that i cannot comprehend, but thank you for sharing.all my love mina..daughter of mahnaa

This is a deeply affecting work, compulsively readable, yet always painful to read, account of the slow garroting of the Jewish community in Vilna. From one page to the next, one is amazed (even now) at the viciousness of the Fascists and the humanity, ingenuity, courage of those they oppressed. God and the devil are both in the details and Kruk gives us plenty of all three.

These stories are the equivalent of being hit on the head with a literary sledgehammer. The points that they make (the Arabs as The Other, the Holocaust as having an impact on modern Israeli society, etc.) are pretty obvious to anyone who has any knowledge of Israel or Jewish history. They occasionally read like writing class exercises, actually.

That being said, the stories are a good window into Israeli society and show elements which you don't see on the news. For excellent Israeli literature, though, I'd have to recommend Yaakov Shabtai, Amos Oz or A.B. Yehoshua.

This is a wonderful book of short stories which contradicts the sterotypical picture of Israelis so often portrayed in the nightly news. It shows (mostly from the female point of view) the nuances of many types of Israelis, from religious to secular, from Ashkenazi to Sephardic, from Arab to Jew. In particular, it brings out the human side of each of its characters and demonstrates that feelings change from time to time and situation to situation. These are beautiful studies of human interaction.

I have four favorite stories. In "A Room on the Roof", a woman's husband goes to Texas, and she decides to build a new room on the second story of her home while he's gone. Her Jewish contractor leaves her alone with three Arab laborers during the construction process. She is not sure to how to react to their presence near and in her home. "The Road to Cedar City" tells of an Israeli couple (Hassida and Yehiel) and their son Yuval who are traveling in the United States when their rented car breaks down. The wife is unhappy when she learns that she must share a ride in a minivan with another young Israeli couple and their baby who are from Jerusalem. A talkative minivan driver further complicates matters by running his mouth during the entire trip. "Mother's Photo Album" is about a Dr. Joshua Hoshen who looks into his mother's medical record after she is hospitalized in a mental institution. He pieces together her life from what he reads in her record and uses a photograph to help resolve his anguish about what he discovers. A most notable story is "The Homesick Scientist" in which eldery Zerubavel wlcomes his nephew, a well-known Israeli scientist who lives in the United States, as he returns to visit Israel after 21 years. His nephew had frequently spent summers with Zerubavel after Zerubavel's own son Uri had been killed while on reserve duty. Zerubavel, although he had eagerly anticipated his nephew's visit, isn't sure what his nephew's motives were for returning after such a long absence.

Great, tight, vivid, exact writing about the Important Things (universal concerns, issues, and feelings) in the mood of a calm and astute observer/chronicler -- with soul. Perfect. Although these stories are primarily concerned with Israelis, I encouraged an East Indian friend to read "The Homesick Scientist"; it spoke to him so deeply of his own private experience that he immediately ordered the book (from Amazon, of course).

Shalev is one of the most original and exciting Israeli novelists, and not well known in the US. This book is fascinating as is Blue Mountain!

I found this book darker and more difficult than Blue Mountain; perhaps it is best labelled "advanced Israeli fiction," whereas Blue Mountain is more accessible to the casual reader. Both books are greatly enhanced by familiarity with their settings and history, but Esau seems to actually demand it. Most notable is one character's experience of the pre-statehood Arab riots in Jerusalem, focusing on the intimacy of personal experience, rather than the comfortable distance of historical perspective. Shalev is a rare writer, intimate with the topography of grief, able to convey the absolute ridiculousness of it without losing sight of the black whole. A most evocative tale, but sometimes difficult to digest. A note: just as Blue Mountain will be of special interest to anyone planning to visit a kibbutz or moshav, or the Galilee for that matter, Esau will probably benefit by being read in Jerusalem.

This book contains 3 short sotries combined in the whole major plot (and hints on it). I read it in hebrew and as always Shalev uses up almost all the words there are in hebrew to describe the emotions of the characters and what hapens to them. Should pay attention to what's happening and the story for example about the 2 soldeirs entering the bakery at night - that was Shalev in his military service. In one of his lectures Shalev admits that writing in first body ("me") is considered to be like masochism. "P.S." There isn't a Jew named Esau.... Is Esau a liyer ?

As a lover of Yiddish writers I disagree with the reviewer who compared S.Y. Agnon to Isaac Bashevis Singer. I enjoyed Only Yesterday but don't think it compares at all to anything written by Singer. I found many passages in this book seemingly pointless and rambling, the grammar, in parts, was simplistic as was the style. This could have been the "fault" of the translators. I did enjoy parts of the books and wanted the whole book to be as good as the best parts but it wasn't the case. If you love books written by Yiddish authors I wholeheartedly recommend reading Only Yesterday by S.Y. Agnon but I urge you to read everything by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

"Only Yesterday" is, perhaps, Agnon's greatest work. In it, he displays the skill of a consummate novelist with the sensibilities of a poet. For those who are familiar with Hebrew poetry, particularly Biblical poetry, "Only Yesterday" conveys in English the rhythms and structure of classic Hebrew poetry while transmitting a sensual and, ultimately, tragic story. It is really not comparable to Singer; it is something far above and beyond Singer's work.

Agnon deserved his Nobel Prize. His most important work, Only Yesterday, casts an array of lights into the inner world of Judaism. Anyone who enjoys Bashevis Singer or Sholom Aleichem will kick themselves for the years they wasted without Agnon, who surpasses them. The translation itself is a wonder. It reproduces the Biblical style of narrative which Agnon brought to modern Hebrew literature. Agnon melds the traditional elements of Rabbinic parable and folkloric animal stories into the modern narrative of the turn-the-century Jewish settlers of Palestine. All in all, the appearance of the English translation is a great event, a must read for lovers of Jewish literature.

Hi i refuse to give this book a worthy so called star. it doesn't deserve it. you'll want to sell the book before you even finish it. before you buy it check at your local library first. it is a book i took out of my collection and trashed it. it wasn't worth my time and i'm sure it won't be worth yours either. it was just about judith going to all these guys. personally it reminds me of someone from where i came from. don't fall for the book it's not worth anyones time. Thank You.

In post World War II Palestine, Judith is dead and her son Zayde inherits something from each of his three fathers. Moshe, the first of the three fathers, hires Judith to care for his two children when his own wife dies in a tragic accident. Globerman, the cattle dealer and the second of the three fathers , falls in love with Judith when he comes to do business with Moshe. Sheinfeld, a canary breeder and the third father, believes he has a relationship with Judith when, in fact, he doesn't. Who the fathers are and the extent of their relationships to Judith and Zayde are revealed as the story is told.

Shalev is most magnificent when he describes the pioneers of Israel as individual characters. They are colorful, quirky, and strong. Again in this book, the author uses the splendor of animals and nature to create a rich, complex story. It may seem confusing at the onset, but all pieces fall into place in the end and the vivid imagery lingers long after the book is closed.

I won't add to the description of the book, I just want to add my praise. This is the 3rd novel I have read of Shalev's and he is a great Israeli writer. Up there with Yehoshua who I also enjoy and respect tremendously. Try Shalev's other books, Blue Mountain and Esau, and Yehoshua too - especially Mr. Mani, the Late Divorce and the Lovers! Beautifully written and great stories.