Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die

by Daniel Stern, Elie Wiesel (Introduction)

Amidst the lights and glamour of the New York theater district during the 1950s, two Holocaust survivors confront each other in order to reckon with a common past—one that hides an awful secret. Jud Kramer, a successful stage director, is in the midst of mounting his most painful and personal play while trying to enjoy the happiness he has found with his beautiful actress wife and baby daughter. Into his life comes Carl Walkowitz, a brooding, charismatic drifter who displays the scars of his concentration camp past in his wounded leg and half-closed eye.

It is the relationship of these two men, one who lives in the past and the other trying to grasp hold of the present, that drives the story of Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die to its terrifying conclusion. Step by step, inexorably, Walkowitz strips Jud of everything dear to him, until finally, standing on an empty stage, the two men, with a woman between them, come face to face in a life-and-death struggle only one of them can survive.

Genres: Holocaust, Novels, American, 20th Century

303 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

Reviews

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel Stern (1928-2007) was a Jewish-American novelist, who explored post-WWII Jewish American life. First published in the 1960s, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die is a moving and sometimes chilling account of how the legacy of the Holocaust continues to haunt those who survived it. Jud Kramer is a Broadway theatre director about to go into production with his play At the Gates, a play about his boyhood in Auschwitz. Whilst mounting this most personal of all his plays, he is trying at the same time to live a normal happy life with his wife and daughter. Into this already conflicted scenario comes Carl Walkowitz, wounded in body and spirit, a fellow survivor but one who bears profound scars from what happened to his loved ones during the Holocaust, and who is obsessed by a desire for revenge for their deaths, deaths for which he holds Jud in some way responsible. The relationship between these two men is at the heart of this powerful novel. One of them can’t shake off the past while the other hopes to exorcise that past through art. “Having survived,” says Jud, “how do you live, how do you…reinvent reasons to believe in art? “
The key question for all of us is “What would you have done?”, and as Jud points out, even in hell people act differently. What is permissible, and what is not in extreme situations, and where responsibility lies when someone is faced with a matter of, quite literally, life and death, is at the core of the book. Daniel Stern does not resolve these issues, but makes the reader confront them and examine his or her own prejudices and assumptions.
With its themes of responsibility, guilt, complicity and freedom and an acute understanding of the psychological effects of trauma, this is a thought-provoking book which will continue to speak to each new generation.

[Carol Ann Sahady · Rating 4 out of 5]

whoever shall read this will see man’s confusion

I say I enjoyed this book but not in the traditional way of feeling joy. I respect the author’s way of viewing the lives he created around himself and how his characters reacted to it. They are all flawed, weak yet believing they are behaving the best they can in their circumstances. May God bless their survival and give them peaceful deaths.