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Ghost Writer
In this haunting and stunning book, Benedix tells us Joe’s story. Somehow, she tells us a story that doesn’t necessarily want to be told. Somehow, she manages to tell Joe’s bold and painful story while her own story simultaneously sneaks in. With breathtaking grace, Benedix navigates the wild, wandering shapes that such stories can take on. And because she invites her readers in so graciously, we are not merely on-lookers or voyeurs. Benedix offers us the chance to become active agents in the storytelling. She allows us to become empathy detectives. And so Benedix tells us Joe’s story, and her story, and even our own.
Sarah Gerkensmeyer , Author of what you are now enjoying , winner of the Autumn House Fiction Prize, Late Night Library’s Debut-litzer, and the Indiana Authors Award
Some writers know that every life story takes form within the constraints of genre, the expectations of readers, the stubborn reality of their subject, and the stubborn integrity of the author herself driven to convey a fullest possible truth. Within the arena of books about Holocaust survivors, only a very few authors have had the knowledge, talent, and commitment to describe that quest in detail. In this vitally important book, Beth Benedix shows herself to be one of those very few. Beautifully conveyed, informed and informing, Benedix shows us what it means to listen to a Holocaust survivor—and to listen to our own listening—with unflinching integrity, candor, and care. This book asks the right questions and--almost unique in writing about survivors--it grounds those questions within the complexity of a full relationship. Benedix cherishes that complexity because she knows it is the real, irreducible thing.
Hank Greenspan , author of On Listening to Holocaust Survivors, Auschwitz, Memory and a Life and the acclaimed play, "Remnants."
Beth Benedix’s Ghost Writer is a deeply layered narrative which, from its first pages, tears into the artful, sometimes disorderly fashion in which story comes together for an author and the man who is her subject. Asked by the family of Joe Koenig, a 90-year-old concentration camp survivor to help collect his stories into a memoir, Benedix completes that fraught and painful enterprise by challenging herself to examine her own past—woman, daughter, mother, teacher, reader. She quickly forges bonds with the unapologetically cantankerous, and unerringly wise, Joe. Thus we are propelled on a journey across the landscape of two emergent one Benedix draws out of Joe, and one he illuminates in her heart and intellect. Cranky, loving, boldly unafraid of his own, deeply earned grudges with the past, Joe is above all a smart man, a teacher, a witness. His compelling lessons are beautifully unsprung by Benedix, who comes to elegantly detail the story of her own passage through pain and memory, literature and philosophy, father, family and dark quirks of the past. Where all this goes, and where it ends, is testament to the freaky, surprising power of a story consciously told, by two brave and full hearts.
Tom Chiarella Ghost Writer is a powerful, gripping story about storytelling itself; it's about the risks involved in trying to tell stories which themselves are dangerous and full of perils. Rather than tread on familiar ground sometimes seen in Holocaust narratives, Beth Benedix offers a rare, intimate glimpse into the torturous task of telling a harrowing story, using a narrative voice which is simultaneously humble and intense, calm and breathless. Ghost Writer is about how to make life whole when things seem to be falling apart, about how the very act of telling stories can sometimes save us.
David Harris-Gershon , author of What do you Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill your Wife?
Sarah Gerkensmeyer , Author of what you are now enjoying , winner of the Autumn House Fiction Prize, Late Night Library’s Debut-litzer, and the Indiana Authors Award
Some writers know that every life story takes form within the constraints of genre, the expectations of readers, the stubborn reality of their subject, and the stubborn integrity of the author herself driven to convey a fullest possible truth. Within the arena of books about Holocaust survivors, only a very few authors have had the knowledge, talent, and commitment to describe that quest in detail. In this vitally important book, Beth Benedix shows herself to be one of those very few. Beautifully conveyed, informed and informing, Benedix shows us what it means to listen to a Holocaust survivor—and to listen to our own listening—with unflinching integrity, candor, and care. This book asks the right questions and--almost unique in writing about survivors--it grounds those questions within the complexity of a full relationship. Benedix cherishes that complexity because she knows it is the real, irreducible thing.
Hank Greenspan , author of On Listening to Holocaust Survivors, Auschwitz, Memory and a Life and the acclaimed play, "Remnants."
Beth Benedix’s Ghost Writer is a deeply layered narrative which, from its first pages, tears into the artful, sometimes disorderly fashion in which story comes together for an author and the man who is her subject. Asked by the family of Joe Koenig, a 90-year-old concentration camp survivor to help collect his stories into a memoir, Benedix completes that fraught and painful enterprise by challenging herself to examine her own past—woman, daughter, mother, teacher, reader. She quickly forges bonds with the unapologetically cantankerous, and unerringly wise, Joe. Thus we are propelled on a journey across the landscape of two emergent one Benedix draws out of Joe, and one he illuminates in her heart and intellect. Cranky, loving, boldly unafraid of his own, deeply earned grudges with the past, Joe is above all a smart man, a teacher, a witness. His compelling lessons are beautifully unsprung by Benedix, who comes to elegantly detail the story of her own passage through pain and memory, literature and philosophy, father, family and dark quirks of the past. Where all this goes, and where it ends, is testament to the freaky, surprising power of a story consciously told, by two brave and full hearts.
Tom Chiarella Ghost Writer is a powerful, gripping story about storytelling itself; it's about the risks involved in trying to tell stories which themselves are dangerous and full of perils. Rather than tread on familiar ground sometimes seen in Holocaust narratives, Beth Benedix offers a rare, intimate glimpse into the torturous task of telling a harrowing story, using a narrative voice which is simultaneously humble and intense, calm and breathless. Ghost Writer is about how to make life whole when things seem to be falling apart, about how the very act of telling stories can sometimes save us.
David Harris-Gershon , author of What do you Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill your Wife?
210 pages, Paperback
Published September 7, 2018
9 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 12, 2018
“There are just so many Holocaust memoirs out there,” author Beth Benedix warns Joe Koenig, the 81-year-old, Polish-born Holocaust survivor whose family is about to hire her to write his story. “If we want to market Joe’s story to a wide audience – and I know I do – I feel like I have to find a way to tell his story that hasn’t been done before.”
Ghost Writer is the result: Not simply a tale of Joe’s amazing life, but also an intense portrayal of what it’s like to write that tale, and how the writing changes the writer.
The actual Holocaust narrative takes up only 31 of the book’s total 210 pages, although it could easily be made into a two-hour movie. Starting when he was 14 years old, Joe hides in a local Gestapo headquarters; jumps out of a truck taking him to be shot; bluffs a group of Poles who want to turn him in to the Nazis; crouches in a cornfield barely steps away from a German officer; voluntarily joins a slave-labor camp; and survives the horrors of Buchenwald, two death marches, and Dachau. After Dachau is liberated, with his entire family wiped out, he joins the Jewish Brigade to fight in Israel’s War of Independence.
That’s the original book that Benedix sends to Joe’s family in December 2009 – what she calls The Suit.
However, the book that’s the subject of this review is called Ghost Writer, and it has a second plot: “The explicit showing of my choices and our conversations and the unexpected turns they took in my attempts to nail the story down,” as Benedix explains. The more she mulls over The Suit, the more dissatisfied she is with the way she went about writing it:
Why did she end the original book with Joe’s enlistment in the Jewish Brigade?
Why did she insert a saccharine flashback while Joe is hiding, terrified, in the Gestapo headquarters?
Why did she repeatedly push Joe for so many details? What difference did it make whether the sky was sunny or grey while he was crouched in the cornfield? The important thing was that a single breath could have gotten him killed.
“There are rules about how to write about the Holocaust.” But does she really have to follow them?
In the process of questioning her writing, Benedix also thinks deeply about her own life as a mother of two young children, a secular Jew, and a professor of world literature, religious studies, and community engagement at DePauw University. Most important, her thoughts spiral to her complicated feelings about her late father, who “was basically an (unsuccessful) career criminal who stole thousands and thousands of dollars and merchandise from just about every place he worked.”
For Benedix, Joe is the calm, wise father-figure she never had. She even asks his advice on how to handle her first-day-of-school jitters.
Thus, it is especially painful that she and Joe’s family have a falling-out in December 2009 – apparently over rights to the material – and “I lose my connection to Joe.”
Most writers tug and pull at their manuscripts, of course. I was still frantically revising my Holocaust novel, The Heirs, in the proofs stage (where you’re merely supposed to fix typos and libelous errors) – and that was after some 10 previous drafts. But I’ve certainly never had the candor to show my readers my outtakes and agony, as Benedix does.
Is there room for another Holocaust memoir? Always. Beyond that, Ghost Writer is also a valuable guide for future memoirists and biographers.
This review was originally published at StoryCircleBookReviews http://www.storycirclebookreviews.org...
Ghost Writer is the result: Not simply a tale of Joe’s amazing life, but also an intense portrayal of what it’s like to write that tale, and how the writing changes the writer.
The actual Holocaust narrative takes up only 31 of the book’s total 210 pages, although it could easily be made into a two-hour movie. Starting when he was 14 years old, Joe hides in a local Gestapo headquarters; jumps out of a truck taking him to be shot; bluffs a group of Poles who want to turn him in to the Nazis; crouches in a cornfield barely steps away from a German officer; voluntarily joins a slave-labor camp; and survives the horrors of Buchenwald, two death marches, and Dachau. After Dachau is liberated, with his entire family wiped out, he joins the Jewish Brigade to fight in Israel’s War of Independence.
That’s the original book that Benedix sends to Joe’s family in December 2009 – what she calls The Suit.
However, the book that’s the subject of this review is called Ghost Writer, and it has a second plot: “The explicit showing of my choices and our conversations and the unexpected turns they took in my attempts to nail the story down,” as Benedix explains. The more she mulls over The Suit, the more dissatisfied she is with the way she went about writing it:
Why did she end the original book with Joe’s enlistment in the Jewish Brigade?
Why did she insert a saccharine flashback while Joe is hiding, terrified, in the Gestapo headquarters?
Why did she repeatedly push Joe for so many details? What difference did it make whether the sky was sunny or grey while he was crouched in the cornfield? The important thing was that a single breath could have gotten him killed.
“There are rules about how to write about the Holocaust.” But does she really have to follow them?
In the process of questioning her writing, Benedix also thinks deeply about her own life as a mother of two young children, a secular Jew, and a professor of world literature, religious studies, and community engagement at DePauw University. Most important, her thoughts spiral to her complicated feelings about her late father, who “was basically an (unsuccessful) career criminal who stole thousands and thousands of dollars and merchandise from just about every place he worked.”
For Benedix, Joe is the calm, wise father-figure she never had. She even asks his advice on how to handle her first-day-of-school jitters.
Thus, it is especially painful that she and Joe’s family have a falling-out in December 2009 – apparently over rights to the material – and “I lose my connection to Joe.”
Most writers tug and pull at their manuscripts, of course. I was still frantically revising my Holocaust novel, The Heirs, in the proofs stage (where you’re merely supposed to fix typos and libelous errors) – and that was after some 10 previous drafts. But I’ve certainly never had the candor to show my readers my outtakes and agony, as Benedix does.
Is there room for another Holocaust memoir? Always. Beyond that, Ghost Writer is also a valuable guide for future memoirists and biographers.
This review was originally published at StoryCircleBookReviews http://www.storycirclebookreviews.org...
November 4, 2018
While Beth Benedix was ghostwriting a memoir for Holocaust survivor, Joe Koenig, he urged Beth to write her own story about what it was like to confront the challenge of telling someone else's history when it "swelled beyond its own boundaries." The result is GHOST WRITER: A STORY ABOUT TELLING A HOLOCAUST STORY.
The book includes Koenig’s survival story, told in third person narrative, and Benedix’s first-person account of trying to nail down that story and give it context, often in terms of her own emotional and intellectual reaction. Koenig’s story was so vast and involved so many “ghosts” that it resisted any kind of tidy closure. The title Ghost Writer is Benedix’s acknowledgment of all the ghosts looming over the story.
The back-and-forth between Koenig and Benedix teases out his survivor story in a different way than such stories are traditionally told. It highlights the role of the listener in preserving and passing on memories. Benedix also accepts the limitations of memory, which underscores the importance of such preservation.
The book includes Koenig’s survival story, told in third person narrative, and Benedix’s first-person account of trying to nail down that story and give it context, often in terms of her own emotional and intellectual reaction. Koenig’s story was so vast and involved so many “ghosts” that it resisted any kind of tidy closure. The title Ghost Writer is Benedix’s acknowledgment of all the ghosts looming over the story.
The back-and-forth between Koenig and Benedix teases out his survivor story in a different way than such stories are traditionally told. It highlights the role of the listener in preserving and passing on memories. Benedix also accepts the limitations of memory, which underscores the importance of such preservation.
July 2, 2020
While Beth Benedix was ghostwriting a memoir for Holocaust survivor, Joe Koenig, he urged Beth to write her own story about what it was like to confront the challenge of telling someone else's history when it "swelled beyond its own boundaries." The result is GHOST WRITER: A STORY ABOUT TELLING A HOLOCAUST STORY.
The book includes Koenig’s survival story, told in third person narrative, and Benedix’s first-person account of trying to nail down that story and give it context, often in terms of her own emotional and intellectual reaction. Koenig’s story was so vast and involved so many “ghosts” that it resisted any kind of tidy closure. The title Ghost Writer is Benedix’s acknowledgment of all the ghosts looming over the story.
The back-and-forth between Koenig and Benedix teases out his survivor story in a different way than such stories are traditionally told. It highlights the role of the listener in preserving and passing on memories. Benedix also accepts the limitations of memory, which underscores the importance of such preservation.
The book includes Koenig’s survival story, told in third person narrative, and Benedix’s first-person account of trying to nail down that story and give it context, often in terms of her own emotional and intellectual reaction. Koenig’s story was so vast and involved so many “ghosts” that it resisted any kind of tidy closure. The title Ghost Writer is Benedix’s acknowledgment of all the ghosts looming over the story.
The back-and-forth between Koenig and Benedix teases out his survivor story in a different way than such stories are traditionally told. It highlights the role of the listener in preserving and passing on memories. Benedix also accepts the limitations of memory, which underscores the importance of such preservation.
April 19, 2020
One of the most unusual books I've read - very moving and surprising. What beings as a request to ghost write a Holocaust survivor's memoir becomes more of a self-examination, always aware of the dangers of comparison and alert to the power of memory and forgetting.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews