also some novels on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Korea and so on should be considered, perhaps, since Stalin (d1952)was a little dubiously mentioned
True stories of the Korean comfort women : testimonies Keith Howard, Han'guk Chŏngsindae Munje Taech'aek Hyŏbŭihoe, Chŏngsindae Yŏnʼguhoe (Korea) Between the 1930s and 1945, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women, mainly Korean, into sexual slavery. This book contains 19 testimonies from surviving Comfort Women, which portray the coercion, violence, abduction, rape and false imprisonment they suffered.
and it's worth reading Paul Steinberg's "speak you also", he was a person described by Primo Levi, his book is a rejection of Levi's description of him...
Every book here is excellent -- I strongly urge everyone to read Bruno Schulz. There is a trilogy by Alexsandr Tisma (published by NYRB) that covers aftermath. Also, not Holocaust, but not unrelated, the Hungarian novelist Peter Nagy has an incredible novel called book fo Memories which is about many things but very evocatively about Hungary during Stalin's Eastern bloc control that covers many of these same themes of survival and resistance. Finally, the Hungarian poet Szilard-Borbely wrote a novel/autofictional account of his family's experience in rural Hungary in the 60s and 70s as despised minorities: The Dispossessed.
Thank you for the list. I also wanted to add that we were taught that the interconnecticity of the internet would shrink race, class and geographic divides, and it was only through intentional online white supremacist campaigns that they gained a political foothold
This is an amazing reading list and I'm so thankful it doesn't include many of the ones that EVERYONE knows. (Thank you for including anything Yugoslav, Yugoslavia and their place in WWII is very complex and fairly unknown. They are most often claimed as a vassal state, but they were actually part of the treaty that let Japan into the Axis, making them an official Axis nation. Unfortunately the Ustashe, a Croatian populist peasant's socialist nationalist movement that had been in exile since assassinating a Hungarian royal in Italy in 1920 I believe, were brought in to govern. They were not well liked. Hitler never was able to bring Yugoslavia fully to heel, neither was the Ustashe government, and so when the communist Partisans of Yugoslavia formed under Josip Broz Tito, seeing as how they were about winning and fuck everything else, Churchill threw all Allied support at them after supporting another resistance group on the Aegean side of Yugoslavia for half the war. They're one of 2 self liberating countries in WW2, but the legacy of the Ustashe is more brutal and far worse than that of the machine efficiency of the Germans. In Yugoslavia they didn't have Zyklon B, so they beat people to death with clubs, stabbed them with knives, shot them summarily en masse, pushed them off mountains. Famously a scene in the movie Come and See is based on an incident where the Ustashe was offering to de-Jew Jews if they became Catholic (this was an official proclamation and whole ass thing in Yugoslavia, Hitler hated it, but it was late enough in the war he couldn't spare any divisions to go down there and deal with the uppity slavs) 200 or so civilians wishing to renounce Judaism just so they wouldn't die were locked inside a church and BURNED ALIVE.
At the end of the war the Ustashe and their known associates fled for Allied lines, expecting that they would be treated better than by the Communists. They made it to Belgium, where ONE very BRAVE lieutenant with maybe 40 men at his command managed to convince some near 40,000 by most estimates Ustashe leadership and troops etc. that they were going to be put on trains to be shipped behind allied lines. (The Ustashe could have easily overran the position and melted into Belgium, they outnumbered the allied forces at this river crossing border by like, 120:1) The trains were called up, the Ustashe thanked them for their kindness, and for days trains ran the Ustashe RIGHT BACK TO ZAGREB, where they were met by Tito and his partisans, who killed them summarily, to a man. According to accounts the slaughter was wholesale and went on for days from sunup to sundown as trains arrived. They would get pulled from them, beaten to death or near it, and pushed into a large open air pit. There are stories of survivors escaping by night, some would crawl out from under piles of bodies and escape, but the leadership was gatted pretty quick. The noise from this slaughter was also apparently legendary and accordingly impossible to describe.
Fuck, way off topic.
Great list, one or two I haven't read I'll be buying asap.
For younger readers, "The Devil's Arithmetic" and "Number the Stars" both haunted me/were some of the best books I read as a kid. They shaped who I am today.
Ive only read Primo Levi's "If this is a man" and the sequel which i forget the name of for the moment. But in these bleak days where fascist behaviour struts shamelessly about in charge of great nations and the propaganda still works as well as ever if not much much better, its high time to read more and bang the drum.
Really strong recommendations. I did "Rise and Fall" two years ago, I think. It is important. That's the most Shakespearean nonfiction. I listen as I read bigger books to keep speed. It's so important: all of it.
I understand my first girlfriend's "older father's" obsession with World War II now - and his tastiness on it, even. World War II questions (deep questions) were his "aptmistest." It really does cover about everything you need to know.
It's postwar but I would add to this list Cyclops by Ranko Marinkovic, I'm very busy so I'll just copypasta the summary from Amazon if you don't mind.
A Croatian Modernist masterpiece of wartime fiction presented for the first time in a pitch-perfect English translation
In this semiautobiographical novel, Croatian writer Ranko Marinkovic recounts the adventures of young theater critic Melkior Tresic, an archetypal antihero who decides to starve himself to avoid fighting on the front lines in World War II. As he wanders Zagreb in a near-hallucinatory state of paranoia and malnourishment, Melkior encounters a colorful circus of characters—fortune-tellers, shamans, actors, prostitutes, bohemians, and café intellectuals—all living in a fragile dream of a society about to be changed forever.
A seminal work of postwar Eastern European literature, Cyclops reveals a little-known perspective on World War II from within the former Yugoslavia, one that has not been available to an English-speaking audience. Vlada Stojiljkovic’s able translation, improved by Ellen Elias-Bursac’s insightful editing, preserves the striking brilliance of this riotously funny and densely allusive text. Cyclops satirizes both the delusions of the righteous military officials who feed the national bloodlust as well as the wayward intellectuals who believe themselves to be above the unpleasant realities of international conflict. Through Stojiljkovic’s clear-eyed translation, Melkior’s peregrinations reveal how history happens and how the individual consciousness is swept up in the tide of political events, and this is accomplished in a mode that will resonate with readers of Charles Simic, Aleksandr Hemon, and Milan Kundera.
Excited to checkout the unfamiliar titles like “Necropolis” and “And I Am Afraid of My Dreams”!
I would recommend the Czech novel “War with the Newts” by Karel Čapek.
it’s a SF satire about humanity discovering and enslaving large, very intelligent salamanders. It has no main protagonist, a slippery narrator, and changes form a few times throughout the novel: random newspaper clippings, scientific appendix about “the sex life of the newts”, and a metafictional dialogue as the final chapter.
also some novels on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Korea and so on should be considered, perhaps, since Stalin (d1952)was a little dubiously mentioned
i'd love a list of those
True stories of the Korean comfort women : testimonies Keith Howard, Han'guk Chŏngsindae Munje Taech'aek Hyŏbŭihoe, Chŏngsindae Yŏnʼguhoe (Korea) Between the 1930s and 1945, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women, mainly Korean, into sexual slavery. This book contains 19 testimonies from surviving Comfort Women, which portray the coercion, violence, abduction, rape and false imprisonment they suffered.
tysm
and it's worth reading Paul Steinberg's "speak you also", he was a person described by Primo Levi, his book is a rejection of Levi's description of him...
Every book here is excellent -- I strongly urge everyone to read Bruno Schulz. There is a trilogy by Alexsandr Tisma (published by NYRB) that covers aftermath. Also, not Holocaust, but not unrelated, the Hungarian novelist Peter Nagy has an incredible novel called book fo Memories which is about many things but very evocatively about Hungary during Stalin's Eastern bloc control that covers many of these same themes of survival and resistance. Finally, the Hungarian poet Szilard-Borbely wrote a novel/autofictional account of his family's experience in rural Hungary in the 60s and 70s as despised minorities: The Dispossessed.
thank you for these recs, perfect
Thank you for the list. I also wanted to add that we were taught that the interconnecticity of the internet would shrink race, class and geographic divides, and it was only through intentional online white supremacist campaigns that they gained a political foothold
100% - what was once a good thing is being stolen and destroyed to facilitate much worse
This is an amazing reading list and I'm so thankful it doesn't include many of the ones that EVERYONE knows. (Thank you for including anything Yugoslav, Yugoslavia and their place in WWII is very complex and fairly unknown. They are most often claimed as a vassal state, but they were actually part of the treaty that let Japan into the Axis, making them an official Axis nation. Unfortunately the Ustashe, a Croatian populist peasant's socialist nationalist movement that had been in exile since assassinating a Hungarian royal in Italy in 1920 I believe, were brought in to govern. They were not well liked. Hitler never was able to bring Yugoslavia fully to heel, neither was the Ustashe government, and so when the communist Partisans of Yugoslavia formed under Josip Broz Tito, seeing as how they were about winning and fuck everything else, Churchill threw all Allied support at them after supporting another resistance group on the Aegean side of Yugoslavia for half the war. They're one of 2 self liberating countries in WW2, but the legacy of the Ustashe is more brutal and far worse than that of the machine efficiency of the Germans. In Yugoslavia they didn't have Zyklon B, so they beat people to death with clubs, stabbed them with knives, shot them summarily en masse, pushed them off mountains. Famously a scene in the movie Come and See is based on an incident where the Ustashe was offering to de-Jew Jews if they became Catholic (this was an official proclamation and whole ass thing in Yugoslavia, Hitler hated it, but it was late enough in the war he couldn't spare any divisions to go down there and deal with the uppity slavs) 200 or so civilians wishing to renounce Judaism just so they wouldn't die were locked inside a church and BURNED ALIVE.
At the end of the war the Ustashe and their known associates fled for Allied lines, expecting that they would be treated better than by the Communists. They made it to Belgium, where ONE very BRAVE lieutenant with maybe 40 men at his command managed to convince some near 40,000 by most estimates Ustashe leadership and troops etc. that they were going to be put on trains to be shipped behind allied lines. (The Ustashe could have easily overran the position and melted into Belgium, they outnumbered the allied forces at this river crossing border by like, 120:1) The trains were called up, the Ustashe thanked them for their kindness, and for days trains ran the Ustashe RIGHT BACK TO ZAGREB, where they were met by Tito and his partisans, who killed them summarily, to a man. According to accounts the slaughter was wholesale and went on for days from sunup to sundown as trains arrived. They would get pulled from them, beaten to death or near it, and pushed into a large open air pit. There are stories of survivors escaping by night, some would crawl out from under piles of bodies and escape, but the leadership was gatted pretty quick. The noise from this slaughter was also apparently legendary and accordingly impossible to describe.
Fuck, way off topic.
Great list, one or two I haven't read I'll be buying asap.
For younger readers, "The Devil's Arithmetic" and "Number the Stars" both haunted me/were some of the best books I read as a kid. They shaped who I am today.
ty for the younger reads, very good
Ive only read Primo Levi's "If this is a man" and the sequel which i forget the name of for the moment. But in these bleak days where fascist behaviour struts shamelessly about in charge of great nations and the propaganda still works as well as ever if not much much better, its high time to read more and bang the drum.
hear hear
The Long Voyage by Jorge Semprún
had not heard of this one, the descriptions sound right up my alley ty
Really strong recommendations. I did "Rise and Fall" two years ago, I think. It is important. That's the most Shakespearean nonfiction. I listen as I read bigger books to keep speed. It's so important: all of it.
I understand my first girlfriend's "older father's" obsession with World War II now - and his tastiness on it, even. World War II questions (deep questions) were his "aptmistest." It really does cover about everything you need to know.
i need to follow yr lead on the Rise and Fall - good call
it's wild how it really does take getting directly immersed in something to understand what makes it a horror to those who were immersed - terrifying
Thank you for this.
I want more people to read Chess Novella by Stefan Zweig.
ooh yes excellent one
It's postwar but I would add to this list Cyclops by Ranko Marinkovic, I'm very busy so I'll just copypasta the summary from Amazon if you don't mind.
A Croatian Modernist masterpiece of wartime fiction presented for the first time in a pitch-perfect English translation
In this semiautobiographical novel, Croatian writer Ranko Marinkovic recounts the adventures of young theater critic Melkior Tresic, an archetypal antihero who decides to starve himself to avoid fighting on the front lines in World War II. As he wanders Zagreb in a near-hallucinatory state of paranoia and malnourishment, Melkior encounters a colorful circus of characters—fortune-tellers, shamans, actors, prostitutes, bohemians, and café intellectuals—all living in a fragile dream of a society about to be changed forever.
A seminal work of postwar Eastern European literature, Cyclops reveals a little-known perspective on World War II from within the former Yugoslavia, one that has not been available to an English-speaking audience. Vlada Stojiljkovic’s able translation, improved by Ellen Elias-Bursac’s insightful editing, preserves the striking brilliance of this riotously funny and densely allusive text. Cyclops satirizes both the delusions of the righteous military officials who feed the national bloodlust as well as the wayward intellectuals who believe themselves to be above the unpleasant realities of international conflict. Through Stojiljkovic’s clear-eyed translation, Melkior’s peregrinations reveal how history happens and how the individual consciousness is swept up in the tide of political events, and this is accomplished in a mode that will resonate with readers of Charles Simic, Aleksandr Hemon, and Milan Kundera.
Thank you for the list. I have read a few of these such brilliant pieces.
Good list. Thank you.
Stanislaw Lem's Hospital Of The Transfiguration would fit in well
ty - haven't read that yet but love Lem, will def pick it up
Excited to checkout the unfamiliar titles like “Necropolis” and “And I Am Afraid of My Dreams”!
I would recommend the Czech novel “War with the Newts” by Karel Čapek.
it’s a SF satire about humanity discovering and enslaving large, very intelligent salamanders. It has no main protagonist, a slippery narrator, and changes form a few times throughout the novel: random newspaper clippings, scientific appendix about “the sex life of the newts”, and a metafictional dialogue as the final chapter.
ty, sounds fantastic
The works of H. G. Adler The Journey, etc. are crucial…
great suggestion ty
EEG is still one of the greatest reading experiences of my life. I would also add ‘And I Am Afraid Of My Dreams’ to the list
it has been added!
I was trying to remember that title! My copy went missing but now I may have to add it here