Max

by Alex Miller

An astonishing, moving tribute to Alex's friend, Max Blatt, that is at once a meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity.

'Max tells of Alex Miller's search -- in turns fearful and elated -- for the elusive past of Max Blatt, a man he loves, who loved him and who taught him that he must write with love. Miller discovers that he is also searching for a defining part of himself, formed by his relation to Max Blatt, but whose significance will remain obscure until he finds Max, complete, in his history. With Max, Miller the novelist has written a wonderful work of non-fiction, as fine as the best of his novels. Always a truth-seeker, he has rendered himself vulnerable, unprotected by the liberties permitted to fiction. Max is perhaps his most moving book, a poignant expression of piety, true to his mentor's injunction to write with love.' Raimond Gaita, award-winning author of Romulus, My Father

I began to see that whatever I might write about Max, discover about him, piece together with those old shards of memory, it would be his influence on the friendships of the living that would frame his story in the present.

According to your 1939 Gestapo file, you adopted the cover names Landau and Maxim. The name your mother and father gave you was Moses. We knew you as Max. You had worked in secret. From an early age you concealed yourself - like the grey box beetle in the final country of your exile, maturing on its journey out of sight beneath the bark of the tree.

You risked death every day. And when at last the struggle became hopeless, you escaped the hell and found a haven in China first, and then Australia, where you became one of those refugees who, in their final place of exile, chose not death but silence and obscurity.

Alex Miller followed the faint trail of Max Blatt's early life for five years. Max's story unfolded, slowly at first, from the Melbourne Holocaust Centre's records then to Berlin's Federal Archives. From Berlin, Miller travelled to Max's old home town of Wroclaw in Poland. And finally in Israel with Max's niece, Liat Shoham, and her brother Yossi Blatt, at Liat's home in the moshav Shadmot Dvora in the Lower Galilee, the circle of friendship was closed and the mystery of Max's legendary silence was unmasked.

Max is an astonishing and moving tribute to friendship, a meditation on memory itself, and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity.

'A wonderful book. It is a story that needs to be heard.' Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University

'It is a beautiful and haunting book…There is something sacred about this story, this delicate act of remembrance…There is a slow, elegant circling in the book's storytelling, as if those precious shards are held up to the light and turned to reveal their facets. But there is a compelling journey of discovery too, not so much into the light as into the darkness, into Max's silence. In Max, the reader becomes engaged in a fascinating, visceral wrestling with facts, the power of the imagination and the character of truth…This book so beautifully evokes the power of places in shaping our consciousness and perception.' - Tom Griffiths. Emeritus Professor, ANU

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Australia, Holocaust, History, Biography Memoir, War

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Alex Miller is one of Australia's best-loved writers, and winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2012.

Alex Miller is twice winner of Australia's premier literary prize, The Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. His fifth novel, Conditions of Faith, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2001 New South Wales Premier's Awards. In 2011 he won this award a second time with his most recent novel Lovesong. Lovesong also won the People's Choice Award in the NSW Premier's Awards, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Age Fiction Prize for 2011. In 2007 Landscape of Farewell was published to wide critical acclaim and in 2008 won the Chinese Annual Foreign Novels 21st Century Award for Best Novel and the Manning Clark Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. It was also short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the ALS Gold Medal and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Alex is published internationally and widely in translation. Autumn Laing is his tenth novel.

Reviews

[Gloria (Ms. G's Bookshelf) · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️3.5 Stars⭐️
This is a non-fiction account of the authors search to find out more about the history of his late friend's life. His friend Max Blatt is a holocaust survivor and was a mentor and friend to Alex Miller.

Max had only revealed fragments of his life during the war to Alex who after his death travels overseas to learn more and search for Max’s remaining family.

The central theme of this story is connection and the way our lives past and present are connected to other people, new friendships and a tribute to an old friend.

A moving story about humanity.

I wish to thank Allen & Unwin for the opportunity to win a copy of this book

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part memoir, part biography, part tribute to a friend, Max tells of Alex Miller’s search for the life and family of his friend Max Blatt. Max revealed only fragments of his life prior to moving to Australia. One thing he did tell Miller was that he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. “What broke me,’he confessed that evening, in words I have not forgotten, ‘was when I realised my tormentor was my brother.”
Miller travels to Poland and Germany to discover what he can. This is a moving book, and there is much to admire as records, letters and eventually contact with Max’s remaining family in Israel reveal some answers. It’s a story of family, friendship, memory and the importance of history.
It was difficult to put down and well worth reading.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book opens with acclaimed Australian novelist Alex Miller’s learning of Max Blatt’s death from Max’s wife Ruth in October 1981. He hadn’t seen the Blatts for two years and, too ashamed by the reasons for his silence, he didn't attend Blatt’s funeral either.

At that stage of his writing life, Miller felt that his dream of writing a novel had failed, and that he had taken the easy and cowardly path of staying out of Max’s way rather than face his disappointment at Miller’s straying from the path of serious writing. Max, a Polish Jewish refugee had believed in Miller’s talent, encouraged him and shared a deep friendship for some years before Miller’s retreat.

Max had said little about his own European life, but offered up brief fragments, including that he was arrested and tortured for weeks by the Gestapo in the late 1930s. He was silent about the details of his life and his family. One night he said to Miller that he didn't know why he survived. Life was futile.

Silence is one of the key words to which Miller returns again and again. Fragments and shards are others.

Joseph Cummins, writing in The Guardian, sums up the emotion around ‘silence’, and also reveals pretty much the conclusion of Miller’s search:

'Miller’s writing in Max is most striking as he weaves recurring words and phrases into the fabric of the journey. “Silence” is like a leitmotif that takes on a multitude of different meanings and resonances: the silence of the unspoken past, of a landscape, of two friends in conversation, of siblings in shared grief. Like many survivors of massive traumatic events like the Holocaust, Blatt’s silence covers the profound difficulty, almost impossibility, of ever speaking about the past. The immensity of sadness and shame is too great to be voiced. For Blatt, the guilt that lies hidden in his silence is the fact that, while the majority of his family were killed in Nazi-controlled Europe, he escaped'.

Miller’s guilt about abandoning Max lasted for decades, and this book, likely to be one of Miller’s last, is his acquittal, if you like, of the responsibility he carried for his neglect of human and moral obligation.

In 2012 Miller was prompted to think actively of Max on a visit to Berlin, and two years later he began to research his life there, starting with the Gestapo records of his arrest and torture. This began a long and complicated search that took Miller to Poland, Germany and Israel, where a few of Max’s surviving relatives live.

At several stages, the novelist Miller interrupts his story to mull on the difference between writing fiction and a truthful story. When things get flat and dull in the research process, they do in the story too. You can’t invent an incident to liven things up, it’s just the way things are.

And, unlike a memoir, where a writer might leave out the boring bits to focus on the highlights, here we get details that mightn’t interest the reader very much (eg how many phone calls it took to get on to someone, changing email addresses etc) they are essential to Miller’s commitment to truthful story telling for the Blatt family.

Quite early in the book Miller describes Max’s story as ‘broken fragments detached from one another in time and place, like the shards of a once beautiful vessel scattered among ruins’.
Miller reflects on the long term shattering effects of torture. Images of fractured and broken life occur throughout the story. And because the story is broken, Miller gives us Fragments, rather than chapters.

It’s a personal, powerful and memorable book.

Excellent reviews at:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/10/09/m...

http://alexmiller.com.au

[Carolyn]

I previously read Miller’s fictionalised autobiography, The Passage of Love, in which the real person Max Blatt appears as the character Martin Bloch. Miller has recently published this non-fiction book about his search for Max Blatt’s story. He knew he had been tortured by the Gestapo and had escaped to eventually find refuge in Australia. I was keen to follow Miller's exploration but about a third of the way through I gave it up. I felt it was a rather meandering approach and that I was not learning anything new about this person or indeed about Nazi oppression or the Holocaust. Others might find it more interesting. I almost always prefer fiction.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Max, the novel by Alex Miller is a beautiful and very interesting account and memoir of one very important man's life.

It's very well written and portrayed.

Thank you to the publishers, Allen and Unwin for a copy of this book to read.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Max, by Alex Miller, is the poignant account of the author's quest to discover the truth about a man who thought his life was futile.  It is, as the blurb says:

An astonishing, moving tribute to Alex's friend, Max Blatt, that is at once a meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity

Max Blatt was the husband of Ruth Blatt, who was a friend of my mother's.  She went to Ruth for private lessons in German, but she never mentioned Max, and now I know why.  Max was a solitary man, who would have absented himself when my mother arrived for her lessons.  I also know now that Ruth was the breadwinner in the family because decades after WW2, Max suffered from poor health as a result of torture at the hands of the Germans. He had been a member of a German Resistance group, and they had tortured him for weeks.

The book begins with Miller's surprising admission that he did not go to the funeral of this dear friend.  At the time of Max's death back in 1981, Miller was teaching and working in theatre, and he was ashamed to admit that he had failed to live up to Max's belief in his future as an author.  Rather than admit to his three failed attempts at novels, Miller stayed out of the way of his best friend and confidante, and two years went by before Ruth rang to tell him that Max had died.  She was hurt by Miller's absence at the funeral, and by his failure to explain himself.  Guilt has obviously gnawed away at him ever since.

Decades passed, but when the opportunity to visit Berlin arose, it became a catalyst for the quest to find out about the parts of Max's life that had never been revealed, concealed within a deep silence that he broke only rarely.  He wanted to write about Max, a man who was very important to him, but he did not want to write fiction, he wanted to write the truth of his life.  In this context, it's impossible to forget the novelised version of Ruth Blatt's life, fictionalised as Ruth Becker in Anna Funder's All That I Am...

The sections of this book are named as Fragments rather than chapters, and in Fragment 14, he has this to say:

[Max's] story is a scatter of such broken shards.  That is its nature.  Almost its central truth.  It is a ruined house.  Liked the bombed-out houses of my childhood after the war.  The pieces were violently blown apart, many of them ground to dust.  To fill in the gaps with the imagination, as if all the pieces could still be located by imagining them, to write as if nothing of value was lost, and lost forever, would be to deny the tragedy of his story.  It would be to miss the truth of his times, when many of the most beautiful things were lost, and truth itself was lost.  Some things can never be retrieved. (p.145)

But there are different kinds of truth:

It is my belief that shared family myths are important and have a way of persisting and nurturing us despite what might come to seem to us in later life to be their lack of objective truth. [...] Something called objective truth is not always achievable, and informed speculation [...] remains critical to the historian's ability to present us with an understanding of the subject. Often our shared family myths, which arise from this informed speculation, embody a private, even a poetic truth for us that can never be found in the official prose of government documents and scholarly articles. Our emotional investment in the results of our research can never carry the same quality of intimacy for us as that carried in stories we received from our parents during our childhood years.  (p.170)

And so, as fragments of Max's life and the fate of his family are discovered, most of it through unexpected chance encounters, and much of it still unclear, Miller comes to believe that there is a moral imperative in the kind of truth-telling that he wants to do in homage to his friend...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/10/09/m...

[Chris Waterford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have loved all of Alex Miller's novels---he is one of my favourite writers but the subject matter of this book had me postponing the reading of it. I needn't have worried. The author's wonderful writing and fine eye for detail was right in my sweet spot and my only regret was that this book is likely to be his last.
7.5/10

[Richard Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply affecting and interesting, I devoured this book very quickly but I need some time to really allow it to soak in. Largely the story of the author's quest to unearth the history of his late friend and holocaust survivor, it largely delves into the impermanence of history, the way so much is lost or skewed by perspective. Was definitely fascinated by the author's recollections of his friend and the personal impact of the search. It felt at times as if the book told me more about Miller himself who is an interesting character in his own right.

Definitely one to return to again and re-examine. I'd like to read it entirely again and focus on Max's story and then maybe another time focusing on Miller

[John Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruth spoke to Alex one day in 1981, asking why he hadn’t attended Max’s funeral. It all began as a shock of guilt… ‘The shock of grief came later, when I was alone.’

Alex Miller is a noted Australian author and playwright. The Max about whom he writes was Max Blatt, a Polish Jew and union organiser opposed to Hitler’s National Socialism who was imprisoned and tortured, but who made good his escape after WW2, with his wife Ruth, through Asia and, finally, from China to Australia.

Max had been a mentor, a coach and a prompt to a young writer and educator, and they had become close - Ruth said Max considered Alex his best friend - but by the late 1970s Alex
found his teaching and his work in theatre repugnant. He’d made numerous attempts at writing a novel but lacked the self-belief to persevere as Max would have expected of him. ‘It had been easier, and more cowardly, to stay away from ...a man cultivated, wise and generous.’

Alex now felt a compunction to search for details of a man with whom he’d spent a great deal of time, because Max had never been totally forthcoming about his early life. What was to follow became a book simply titled Max.

The search took Alex (and his wife, Stephanie) to a variety of locations and some interesting settings, from meeting Dr Horn, a senior figure at Germany’s Bundesarchiv, to placing flowers on the grave of poet, Marek Edelman, in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery, and a drive across Israel, ‘...a land of steep ravines, the bones of the earth shattered.’

The story proves absorbing and involving to someone with broad interest in the war, especially as it relates to treatment of Jews and the changes to boundaries and national identity (not that this is anything new, many central European countries having faced ‘Endless wars for possession.’)

The mood of the book varies, page to page, between wonder, shock, humour, sorrow and, decidedly, love, and ends with a scene of new friendships, Alex taking a photograph,

‘This group of friends who had arrived in my life ...were real and whole, while Max would always remain our common link, a broken vessel, the most precious parts of his life scattered among the ruins of the terrible past.’

[Anne Fenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

What stands out for me in this book, is how emotional the author is. It tells the story of his search to clarify the background of his friend Max Blatt. He’s dead now but was a very close friend of the author for many years. Max’s background is Polish/German, came to Australia post WW2. He was very politically involved, ran into trouble with the Gestapo as early as 1933. We pick up a lot about how much the two men meant to each other. A feature of this is silence....has me thinking how different it could be if they were women. The author wants to find out more about him, involving trips to Germany, Poland and Israel. Often from Castlemaine, where the writer now lives. There’s a lot of mystery, a real quest, joy and much sorrow. I found it absolutely enthralling, not in an excited way, more of feeling a shared need for a resolution of the questions raised in the book. The Holocaust looms over the whole book. Later I was browsing the Conversation website, read an article on the need to teach young generation about the Holocaust....all ok until I read the ensuing conversation between readers, mature Australians, theme being the Holocaust wasn’t really so bad, it’s attention seeking when there are bigger losses of life to consider. Made me feel sick.

[Pam Tickner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you Allen and Unwin for sending me a copy of this book, a tribute to Miller's holocaust survivor friend Max Blatt. It is foremost a reminiscence on the meaning of friendship and a search for truths which may never be known.

[Lesley Moseley · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2. stars. Almost gave up about 1/3 of the way, but went on and suddenly, as happened to me , when doing my own geology research, amazing 'coincidences' happens. You 'bump' into people who know someone, and the whole project starts gathering a pace of it own. Ended up really glad I continued.

[Anna Maree · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book Alex Miller takes us along with him as he decides to find out more about the life of his long time friend Max Blatt. Max had shared snippets of his life with Alex over the many years of their friendship but now that Max has passed away there are many questions that are left unanswered. No matter how well we think we know someone there will always be things from there past and even their deepest inner turmoil in the present that we simply have no knowledge of.
Alex stated that he didnt want to write a story about the Holocaust as such but to tell the life story of any Jewish person who lived during that time you must share details of the Holocaust as no matter if they were in a camp or on the other side of the World ....still, their lives were entangled greatly with loved ones that were imprisoned in concentration camps, no longer living or hiding in fear. If you survived did that mean that you then had to carry the guilt that you lived while many of your loved ones didnt?
This story of Max is one where Alex looks at the man he called friend. He calls it as it is. Sees the imperfections and accepts them and knows that they only add to his perfection of a great friend.
It took me a little while to get into the story but only because of the tangled web of people that I had to try and remember who and how they were connected.
The tragedy and disgusting extermination of so many Jewish people during the war is something we must never forget and never allow to happen ever again.

[Trish · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't read a lot of non-fiction. But this sounded like it would be a good read.
It was okay.
I think the subject was close to the heart for the author and perhaps his dedicated readers will be more engrossed in the story on his behalf than I was.
It was quite a placid storytelling journey. There wasn't much meat to it. There was research, but not enough people telling their stories.
Perhaps (and I'm being honest here) I'm jaded from too many horror stories of the atrocities of the holocaust. Or I'm sick and only engage in the truly horrific story. Told you, I'm being honest.
I did want to get to know Max, and that wasn't easy for Alex to do with the limited information available and the time gone by.
I am happy for Alex that he got to meet some of Max's surviving family, but even their knowledge and understanding of Max was at a distance. They didn't really know him. A couple of the late insights given by Max's niece Liat were good and timely, because if we hadn't had them there almost might have been no point in writing the book - for a reader. For Alex's own need and enjoyment, yes.
So, as usual the opinion here is subjective. I persevered and it was an okay read.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of Alex Miller telling the story of Max Blatt. Max was a Jewish German spy and Alex's best friend. Alex reveals small fragments of Max and his family's life stories while describing his travels and quests to uncover Max's history. I enjoyed this part of the book, Miller would make a great travel writer! I found the sections about Max to be too fragmented to really connect with though, maybe I need to read The Passage of Love which is a fictionalised take on Max's history. I also wanted to know more about their friendship, he alludes to a falling out, but it was never really elaborated on. I felt I needed that to make a full emotional connection to the story.

[Jillwilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone in my bookclub described this non-fiction narrative as “…a book that was almost great.” I didn’t quite feel like that but I liked the expression. I’ve read a lot of books like that.

In fact when I first read the book I found it a little stilted but the group conversation about the book was very stimulating and I shifted a bit in my views.

This book moves like a detective story as Alex tries to understand what happened to his old friend Max Blatt (of the title) before and during World War 11. He came to know Max after he migrated to Australia. Alex’s first wife became connected with Max’s second wife Ruth through German lessons in Melbourne. Max was older than Alex and became something of a mentor to him; believing in his talents as a writer and in fact providing the story line for the first story that Alex ever had published. But their friendship had withered at the end and when Max died in the 1980’s Alex did not attend the funeral. A trip to Berlin in 2012 and again in 2014 is galvanising; Miller decides that he wants to try to write “a celebration of his [Max’s] life”.

The short version is that Max, a young Jewish communist, escaped Germany and then in 1940, Poland and came to Australia through Shanghai. He left behind his parents, siblings and a first wife. lived out the war in Shanghai, working as a pharmacy assistant, marrying Ruth Heinrichsdorf in 1946 and arriving in Melbourne the following year, where he lived in the suburbs and was a -tailor and then a machinist. Max also appears in Millers last book ‘The Passage of Love’ as Martin, a troubled man who visits the main character on his farm and seems to find some peace there.

So Alex tries to find out what happened before he came to know Max. The book is structured around 18 ‘Fragments’ which are part of the trail which culminates in discovery of some relatives of Max’s in Israel and a journey there to try to make sense of the fragments of story they have.

I don’t really want to describe too much else about the things that are discovered. What I think the book is about, on reflection, is the long shadow of trauma and how people respond to it. One of the psychologists in my bookclub referred to this; talking about the intergenerational trauma experienced by so many people. As Alex meets Jewish people born many years after the end of World War 11, he is confronted by the immediacy of their feelings. “I understood that for their generation [young Israeli Jews] the Holocaust was still going on, that in the lives of all Israeli Jews it would never end… Neither Keren or Oded was oppressed by the past, but they were damaged by it. And not just them, but their society, their people, they said…” Miller goes on to talk about the impact of racist practices against Aboriginal people – he says “..the paradox they could all agree on; we are a damaged people, and this, uniquely, is our strength, our bond. It is in the way that Aborigines of all groups readily address other Aborigines who are strangers to them as brother, sister, aunty, uncle.” A little later he writes: “…I was aware that to present Max’s story and the story of his family as whole and complete would be a betrayal of their truth. There was no wholeness. Many of the most precious and beautiful things that had once been part of Max’s and his family’s life bad been smashed beyond recovery. The mosaic of their story was contained in an incomplete collection of shards. Large parts of the picture were missing and would never be recovered. His song, the song of his family, had no chorus in which all voices sing together. Silence had become one of Max’s imperishable truths. His silence, that mysterious silence that had drawn me to him the very first time I met him, contained a whole world that no longer existed and would never exist again.”

When I was a teacher I used to take kids to the Holocaust Museum in Melbourne. At that time, there would usually be survivors who would take time to talk to my students about their experiences. We had usually read a novel or watched a film that explored something of the experiences of Jewish people at that time. I wanted my teenage students to know about the Holocaust and to have opportunities to empathise and hear first-hand what it might have been like for an individual. I don’t know what stuck in terms of those experiences. I still feel it’s important. I was revising some teaching materials about the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism recently and it seems that we have a lot of pre-conditions in various parts of the word for another huge dose of fascism. I find it scary. It makes this book (which is both a set of personal stories and depiction of a larger context), a book that is so relevant.

A couple of digressions to end:
1. Ruth Blatt was captured in fiction as Ruth Becker in Anna Funder’s book ‘All that I am.’ It’s extraordinary that these two (Max and Ruth) have featured in three recently published Australian books.
2. The photos – which are a mix of historic ones of the Blatt family – and ones of Alex’s journeys with his wife as he seeks to uncover more about Max – add a intimacy to the story.
3. When Olek hands the girl the flowers, there is no follow-up story. The group is seated on the left hand side of the restaurant. This detail goes no further. One plate of cake has a different design to the others – again, this is not a plot element. At times I found the details in the book a little frustrating – as if Miller had taken heaps of photos and felt compelled to describe every last detail. It took away, a little, from the main import of the story. Or maybe it added humanity. Two ways of looking at it!

[Samantha Battams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently enjoying this book! I loved Lovesong and Conditions of Faith (which Alex Miller encouraged me to read when I met him in Adelaide on his book tour on Lovesong). Will read all of his books one day.

[Caren · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5) Alex Miller, the highly respected Australian author, well understood the responsibility and sacredness attached to the act of remembrance. In accepting that responsibility, Miller undertook to research the Holocaust experience of his best friend and mentor, Max Blatt, decades after Blatt's death. Miller also understood that in respecting Blatt's silence during his life in Australia, post-war, "How could there ever be a complete story, a complete portrait...So much of what was once great, once beautiful, once loved, was smashed and lost forever...We have only fragments...Completeness from such a world would be an obscenity...a lie."

Thus, the acclaimed novelist understood that the book he would write had to be non-fiction, that there could be no place for imagination, no creative filling in the gaps "as if nothing of value was lost, and lost forever." This creation of details would "deny the tragedy of his story." This understanding was fostered by Miller's friendships with well-known Holocaust survivors in the Melbourne Jewish community: Jacob Rosenberg and Kitia Altman. In recognising that Max was a "damaged" man, Miller came to recognise the truth in Jean Amery's conclusion that "Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world."["At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities."]

The extensive research Miller conducted took him to Germany, to Poland, and to Israel, each of his trips supported by his wife and the circle of historians and archivists who joined in his search to piece together as best he could the broken "shards" of Max's lost years. What Miller's journey yielded was the discovery of Max's extended family in Israel - a brother and his children - with whom Miller immediately bonded and with whom he could share his loving memories of the man who had inspired him to write all those years ago. In fact, from this connection, Miller learned that Max had wanted him to write his story, almost as if it were fated that he do so.

What made this book so beautiful was the deep respect and sensitivity of Miller's understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on the survivor and the responsibility we have to remember it, despite the unanswered questions and uncertainties that remain.

[Cassie Woolley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have become conditioned to expect books about the war to be dramatic exposes of atrocities overcome by the human spirit. This book is instead a quiet exploration of the nature of human stories in the context of the author trying to piece together the life story of his friend who has long since passed on.

Miller asks fundamental questions about what it means to tell the story of a life. Is there one truth, one single story that can encompass every detail of a life? Or are our stories composed not only by ourselves, but by those who knew us, where each person holds a different truth about who we were and what we did? Can anyone fully know another person?

Miller also explores what it means to be irreparably damaged, the effects of inter-generational trauma, and whether humans can be damaged by the past yet not oppressed by it.

A central theme is one of connection, and the ways that our lives and stories are connected to so many others in intricate and seemingly random ways. Even so, we are capable of inflicting terrible suffering on our fellow humans. Is any of us all good or all evil, or do we all hold the potential for both?

I am left with many questions and thoughts, including that posed by the author: "What is it in human nature that drives us periodically into a suffocating embrace of evil?"

[Renee Hermansen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to A&U for this copy to read and review honestly.

At first I found this book hard to get into but I then found it a very interesting read.

Alex Miller was determined to write his friend Max's story. His research throughout was so thorough, he found lost relatives of Max, visited many countries, searched registrars and read letters, all to uncover the untold mystery that surrounded Max's life. Max was a Jewish Nazi resistance figure who survived the holocaust but lost many family and loved one's without really knowing what happened to them. He was a reserved man who lived with much guilt.

One thing that sticks with me is that imagined truths can be just as meaningful as real truths.

Some people endure a lot in life but also leave an impact in death.

[Caroline Poole · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last line....”Max.....a broken vessel, the most precious parts of his life scattered among ruins of the terrible past.”
A book full of beautiful sentences exploring and discovering his great friend. Such an amazing tribute to an interesting and undiscovered life.
Unfortunately all questions can’t be answered and only makes it even harder to comprehend the millions of unheard stories and voices from this horrific time in history.
A pleasure to read and an honour to know more of Max and his life.

[Donna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the second book by this author I have tried to read. He seems to win a lot of awards but they just don't do it for me. This one is a true story about the authors friend Max and how Alex tries to find out more about Max's life in the and during the war.

I found it was more about Alex's journey to discover Max's story than it was about Max's story which disappointed me. I must say it kind of bored me and I did skip bits. Think I will now give this author a wide berth from now on.

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a gem of a book. Although this is a book that revolves about war, it is a quiet book, full of reflection. Alex Miller is searching for details of his friend's life, after Max's death. The search and involved travel is fascinating as Alex has the good fortune to be introduced to people from Max's earlier life. Stories can always be viewed from many positions.
If you are a fan of Alex Miller's writing, don't miss this!

[Anne Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

A moving testament to a deep friendship and the author's dedication to exploring the life history of the man who became his friend, but was always enigmatic about his past. Miller pursues what turn out to be only fragments or shards of this life and although the complete truth eludes him he discovers in the process, connections, friendships and loving relationships with those whose lives were also intertwined with Max.

[Jane Mulligan 🍾 · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are full of flaws and often haunted by regret for past actions and inaction. While we still live we have the ability to think deeply on this. How we have hurt and let the people we love down and how we have the opportunity to atone for this somehow with our future actions. This is a very moving book about love, friendship and self-forgiveness.

[Heather Boundy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has Alex Miller ever written a bad book. He excels here yet again in his story about the search for the truth about his long-time friend Max Blatt. It is a story as intriguing as the best crime fiction and still leaves some questions unanswered at the end. His life, a jigsaw puzzle of concealment. Wonderful read.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always enjoy Alex Miller’s writing. I didn’t get into this book as much as his others - I found it way less polished, almost like research notes in preparation for a book - but it was still compelling and thought-provoking re the impossibility of trying to piece together the whole story of another person’s life. And it must mean so much to Max and his family. 3.5 stars.

[Margaret Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

What better way to acknowledge the life of a close friend than to record his life, especially a life as interesting as Max Blatt's. This is a story that acknowledges friendship, family, history and politics from Araluen to Poland, Castlemaine to Israel, bringing home to the reader the horrors of Nazi Germany but in such a personal way as it touches the lives (and deaths) of Max's family.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

An esteemed fiction writer writing non fiction, the unearthing of his mentor's family and history years after his friend's death. This exploration leads him to travel to Berlin, to Israel, and to explore his own feelings towards Max. Moving, surprising, heartbreaking, it is also the story of Alex Miller, his development as a writer and the complexity of friendship.

[Jillian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve liked a lot of the author’s novels but I couldn’t finish this book. It wandered all over the place and needed a good edit. The subject of torture and it’s impact on the victims was one I was keen to explore, but I couldn’t quite follow the narrative.