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Fire Ant Books
East of Time
Remaining human in the face of life's greatest threat. This book is a rendezvous of history and imagination and dreams and of hopes and disenchantments. It unfolds in a succession of reminiscences that weave together a shimmering tapestry depicting a lost world. The setting is Lodz, Poland, in the years between the author's childhood and early maturity, a period overtaken by the cataclysmic events of the 1930s and early 1940s. The narrative approach presents a powerful personal testament and reflects the determination of an entire community to remain human in the face of its greatest peril, even at the last frontier of life. East of Time received the 2006 New South Wales Premier's Award for the Best Book of Non-Fiction and was short-listed for the 2006 Australian Literary Society's Gold Medal and the South Australia Arts Festival Award for Innovation in Literature.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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127 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 26, 2009
A lyrical memoir from a Holocaust survivor. It is extraordinary. Unforgettable. Rosenberg is able to look into the abyss of human evil and remain human. Full of self-deprecating wit and huge compassion and yet vulnerable and enraged when contemplating the murder of the innocents, his little nieces, marched away to their deaths with their hands up at Auschwitz.
This is the first volume in his memoirs, where he remembers life in the Lodz ghetto. It ends at the gates of Auschwitz where all his family were murdered, and he survived only because he was a strong teenager put to work.
The sequel, "Sunrise West" is just as compelling. It traces his enslavement at Mauthausen and the liberation. He travels to Australia with his wife Esther (herself a survivor of nine camps) where both must deal with post traumatic stress in a time when there was no name for it. Their courage and hope and their determination to live lovingly shine through. Both books are masterpieces.
This is the first volume in his memoirs, where he remembers life in the Lodz ghetto. It ends at the gates of Auschwitz where all his family were murdered, and he survived only because he was a strong teenager put to work.
The sequel, "Sunrise West" is just as compelling. It traces his enslavement at Mauthausen and the liberation. He travels to Australia with his wife Esther (herself a survivor of nine camps) where both must deal with post traumatic stress in a time when there was no name for it. Their courage and hope and their determination to live lovingly shine through. Both books are masterpieces.
September 4, 2013
Extremely sad, yet beautifully poetic, a look into the life of a holocaust survivor, filled with stories, and poetry, truthful, shocking yet filled with hope and strength.
January 18, 2018
“One tries to get to the bottom of things, but it's all just a running around in circles. History is absurd, events escape the control of reason. Time to withdraw into our own little world if we can.”
This is a beautiful and unusual book. Part remembrance and part imagination, Jacob Rosenberg takes us to Lodz, Poland, specifically to the horrors of the Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Rosenberg remembers stories, songs, specific characters and neighbors that for the most part, met their death, either in the ghetto or in their "resettlement".
The chapters are short, and each tells a person's story. But it is done so honestly and lyrically, that as a reader, I felt like I was being given a precious gift of memory.
Murderers, torturers, thugs and the "unnavigable sea of hate which the local populace had so deftly dug out around us" surround this tight-knit community. The barbarity chills your heart as you read, but Rosenberg is no victim. There is love for his family, love for his friends, the observations of a decent and kind man witnessing a world gone mad.
There is no love here for Chaim Rumkowski, chosen by the Nazis as "The Elder" who remained well fed as he chose who would be sent to resettlement. The elite in the ghetto who bartered other people's lives, not for their survival but for their profit, are for me extraordinary criminals in partnership with the Nazis. Ugh.
Jacob Rosenberg's family were all immediately gassed in Auschwitz. Jacob is a survivor and we are privileged that he has given us the gift of his memories and imagination.
I loved this book.
This is a beautiful and unusual book. Part remembrance and part imagination, Jacob Rosenberg takes us to Lodz, Poland, specifically to the horrors of the Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Rosenberg remembers stories, songs, specific characters and neighbors that for the most part, met their death, either in the ghetto or in their "resettlement".
The chapters are short, and each tells a person's story. But it is done so honestly and lyrically, that as a reader, I felt like I was being given a precious gift of memory.
Murderers, torturers, thugs and the "unnavigable sea of hate which the local populace had so deftly dug out around us" surround this tight-knit community. The barbarity chills your heart as you read, but Rosenberg is no victim. There is love for his family, love for his friends, the observations of a decent and kind man witnessing a world gone mad.
There is no love here for Chaim Rumkowski, chosen by the Nazis as "The Elder" who remained well fed as he chose who would be sent to resettlement. The elite in the ghetto who bartered other people's lives, not for their survival but for their profit, are for me extraordinary criminals in partnership with the Nazis. Ugh.
Jacob Rosenberg's family were all immediately gassed in Auschwitz. Jacob is a survivor and we are privileged that he has given us the gift of his memories and imagination.
I loved this book.
December 21, 2022
How can anyone describe such an extraordinary book? The transcendent lyrical quality of the prose, the shimmering all-too-brief descriptions that encapsulate the life of a person in a single episode - this is a book about people.
Rosenberg focuses on memorialising people, rather than events. He chronicles their thoughts, their hopes, their foibles, their personalities, the shining flame that burns in each before it is abruptly extinguished in the Holocaust. And while it is a task of honour for him to do so, it is in some ways self-defeating: the stories are so many, so filtered through a philosophical and poetic soft-focus lens, that ultimately none are memorable. Even the potential villains. I wanted to remember the stories, but in the end, found none stood out sufficiently. And all of them should have.
Rosenberg focuses on memorialising people, rather than events. He chronicles their thoughts, their hopes, their foibles, their personalities, the shining flame that burns in each before it is abruptly extinguished in the Holocaust. And while it is a task of honour for him to do so, it is in some ways self-defeating: the stories are so many, so filtered through a philosophical and poetic soft-focus lens, that ultimately none are memorable. Even the potential villains. I wanted to remember the stories, but in the end, found none stood out sufficiently. And all of them should have.
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October 18, 2020This is a collection of reminiscences from the Lodz ghetto, a tribute to the rich diversity of personalities who Rosenberg wants to memorialise. He owes it to them not to let them be forgotten. It's full of poetry and snatches of traditional songs and is deeply elegiac without being morbid. The only thing is, there's so many of them, and he was just a boy — I feel that perhaps some of these memories may not really be his own, but it doesn't matter.
But it is true that even very young children remember things that derive from a traumatic event... so it could be that these vivid recollections are indeed his own.
But it is true that even very young children remember things that derive from a traumatic event... so it could be that these vivid recollections are indeed his own.
March 29, 2018
Like a combination of obituaries , fables and humorous wisdom tales, Jacob Rosenberg threads us into the lives of those he grew up around and through. They live on through him, and their joys and sorrows, trials and triumphs are full of the warm blood of living. An enchantment of the best kind, it keeps you looking forward and what is carried or left behind does not become insignificant but transformed.
April 21, 2023
Essential reading!!!
January 11, 2012
Memoir on the holocaust written by a poet without an ounce of bitterness. What I most loved was its tenderness, simplicity and intelligence.
Want to read
August 18, 2018Suggested by Helen Garner.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews