Marcie Hershman's Speak to Me is simply one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. On one level this is "about" the death of a beloved sibling; on its other levels, it engages us in the power of the human voice to speak in so many ways about love -- the love that moves us out of grief and into a richer sense of our lives. That we might hear again our loved one's voice in dreams, or "play" that voice again on audio tape, or have it echo again in memory, and that there are mysteries, too--voice after death--all these aspects of our connection to each other Marcie Hershman reminded me of. She has wit, wisdom and an honesty that reveals the heart of the matter. Her ten meditations, so gorgeously written, and so deeply felt, told me not only about the special bond she and her brother Rob shared, but of the bond I too have felt with family members I have lost. There are so many voices I still long to hear. I am extraordinarily glad to have read Speak to Me. I urge others to read it and share it. This is beautiful, heart-stirring work!

To face your fears, to really dig down deep and write from the heart, is the biggest challenge for any writer. Marcie Hershman more than scales a mountain in SPEAK TO ME. This book is smart and serious yet it ends with such hope and joy, I was sad to put it down. Bravo! A beautiful tribute and memoir.

Marcie Hershman's moving, lyrical account of her brother's death and the chasm of yearning it carved in her life is a tale of revealing honesty and profound feeling. I am a true fan of Hershman's work -- Tales of the Master Race counts, for me, as one of the best books of the last decade, maybe any decade, and certainly one of the most important works every written about the Holocaust -- and her latest, though quite different in its subject, is just as transforming, suffused by the same kind of mature emotional intelligence. It's a weeper, but it soars, ultimately, toward the kind of victory we can only find at the far side of our deepest losses. A work of elegance, sorrow and triumphant truth.

This book took me up by the first page and then steadily moved deeper and deeper, taking me into the lives of an immigrant Jewish family, generation by generation, and also into the social history of this country, as both family and country became more open to "outsiders" even while the challenges of being "safe" remained. Sometimes heartwrenching, because you see the reality of the lives at stake. Always an eye-opener! And the writing is beautiful.

Author Hershman's TALES OF THE MASTER RACE is an ambitious collection of "anti-Fairy Tales". They are thematically connected. They employ the convention of setting the stories in a fictional Bavarian town to focus on lives of ordinary citizens during the "nether Time" of The Third Reich's apogee in history and Power. The tales of "civic-minded" but not ostentatiously political (certainly not Nazi) townfolk reek with malice and an ambience of poisonous mendacity. There are clerks, construction workers, shop keepers; homebody husbands and wives whose lives begin to contract like cancer The Evil which radiates like an anti-Sun from Der Fuehrer in Berlin. The energy devoted by das guten Leute to daily business, gossip,adulteries and petty schemes to enrich themselves starkly contrasts with equally energetic denial that their little "stadt" has been transformed into a Death Camp as heinous and brutal as the MYTHICAL ones (Auschwitz...Treblinka...etc.).

The "good" Germans are beheaded as Enemies of The State in the cellar of the local constabulary. The latter is commandeered by SS as prison for Jews and other undesireables before final RESETLEMENT. The People know this and pretend not to...Wir wissen nicht! These themes have been discussed in fact, film and literature many times and will be a continued focus in the study of the dark side of the human condition. Miss Hershman's novel is another contribution. It's a powerful attempt to assert something that is difficult and unnerving: BRAVERY and HONESTY in the face of danger and EVIL is not common; and is itself dangerous because of the umbrage it stirs. The novel...like a time bomb... builds explosive layers of petty revenge,resentment, greed and cowardice until it seems ready to conclude in an violent denouement. But the "explosion" never occurs. True, in the climactic story called THE SHIFT, there is an RAF bombing raid (following the pivotal defeat of German forces at Stalingrad)that signals an end to "costless" triumph and conscienceless conquest. But no great character ephipanies occur. The habit of denial and complicity that characterized The Master Race as victors now commandeers their sensibilities as "victims". The book ultimately fails because the mystery of what Hanna Arendt termed "the banality of evil" is beyond Hershman's reach. The principal characters in these anti-fairy tales are unlikeable. A "heroine" tacked-on at the end of the collection (a Resistance informant who refers to herself...with "pride" of one paroled from Purgatory... as The Traitor) is too little too late to infuse hope into despair that dominates the novel. Alexandre Solzhenitsyn stated the difference between masterpiece and the ordinary good book is the 5% between 95 and 100%. Author Hershman has written a "good" book that is worthy of serious reading and criticism. How it fails is perhaps intrinsic to the ironic format it assumes: ANTI-FAIRY TALE. Fairy tales are constructed to teach Goodness and Hope...triumphant in the face of evil. TALES OF THE MASTER RACE is meticulously deconstructed "mythology" which seethes with malice and treachery. An entire society is doomed to "live unhappily ever after." In my estimate, great literature affirms and rarely assumes a final damning judgment. Miss Hershman's excellent first novel could have been more than Just Curse...it could have been a redeeming Candle in Darkness she so adeptly evoked......

It has been a long time since I have read a novel this engaging. What a page turner! I could not put it down! What makes the story even more fascinating is the way it is so well-written, you can see yourself in the characters and their total obliviousness to what is going on around them in the midst of their self-centered little dramas -- pretty much like what is going on today in the USA. If only we could all see beyond the next drama to the bigger picture. The world is crumbling all around us, and we can't even see the sacrificial victims on the trains on their way to the ovens.

Very often we wonder how such a thing could have happened. Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. It is not difficult at all. And all one has to do to change it is to pay attention.

Pay attention now. Read this book.