What do you think?
Rate this book
Quiet Americans
A high-ranking Nazi's wife and a Jewish doctor in prewar Berlin. A Jewish immigrant soldier and the German POWs he is assigned to supervise. A refugee returning to Europe for the first time and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. A son of survivors and technology's potential to reveal long-held family secrets. These are some of the characters and conflicts that emerge in QUIET AMERICANS, in stories that reframe familiar questions about what is right and wrong, remembered and repressed, resolved and unending.
164 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
About the author
Erika Dreifus
11 books227 followersErika Dreifus's latest book (and first poetry collection) is titled Birthright, published by Kelsay Books in November 2019.
Erika is also the author of a story collection, Quiet Americans, which was published by Last Light Studio and named a 2012 Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title (for "outstanding Jewish literature"). The book was also recognized as a Top Small-Press Book (Shelf Unbound) and Notable Book (The Jewish Journal) for 2011.
Quiet Americans is largely inspired by the experiences and stories of Erika's paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s, and by Erika's own identity as a member of the "third generation." Portions of proceeds from sales of Quiet Americans are being donated to The Blue Card Fund, whose mission is to assist survivors of Nazi persecution and their families who are in need in the United States.
Erika is also the author of a story collection, Quiet Americans, which was published by Last Light Studio and named a 2012 Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title (for "outstanding Jewish literature"). The book was also recognized as a Top Small-Press Book (Shelf Unbound) and Notable Book (The Jewish Journal) for 2011.
Quiet Americans is largely inspired by the experiences and stories of Erika's paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s, and by Erika's own identity as a member of the "third generation." Portions of proceeds from sales of Quiet Americans are being donated to The Blue Card Fund, whose mission is to assist survivors of Nazi persecution and their families who are in need in the United States.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
December 22, 2014
Erika Dreifus inhabits a little corner of a personal world that I do; a writer with a story of German Jewish grandparents who escaped the Holocaust and whose legacy lives strongly at our centers. From her robust and broad platform involving many other pursuits, Dreifus writes, reviews, collects and analyzes stories of that legacy, both from her own family and in the work of others. While by no means the only writer to engage in this topic, I have yet to come across another who does it with more generosity, breadth of literary knowledge in the “genre” and thoughtful excellence. Perhaps, then, it comes as no surprise that I was predisposed to find Quiet Americans an incisive sampling of German survivors’ and their childrens’ experiences in America in the aftermath of WWII.
These are taut stories, each with the titled 'quiet' suggesting restraint, secrecy, suppressed memory and the ordered contraction of everyday experience to its workable details. Dreifus does not shy away from the dualities of good and evil and the ironies that complicated many experiences of survivors, as in “For Services Rendered” in which a high ranking Nazi’s wife intervenes on behalf of her pediatrician’s family even as her husband orders the deaths of others. In “Lebensraum” a young newly minted American soldier’s own escape from Germany made his supervision of kitchen worker German POWs a painful challenge to his dogged efforts to normalize as an American. In “Floating” the excruciating uncertainty of a risky pregnancy takes on deeper layers of agony in the grandmother-to-be whose family history of loss and uncertainty left her constantly needing the reassurance of ‘everything will be all right.’ Finally, in “The Quiet American, or how to Be a Good Guest,” the narrative voice behind all the stories comes out in measured dread of a visit to Germany and a (quiet) confrontation between contemporary perspectives of the meaning and primacy of death and destruction wrought by the War. The well-bred restraint borne of German breeding, repressed and managed memories and the desire to assimilate goes head to head in all these stories with the history of uncontrollable evil and losses that reverberate in increasingly nuanced ways through successive generations. These stories are great reads in their own right, but are especially poignant and meaningful as they reflect a common family experience. “Prosit”, Erika Dreifus.
These are taut stories, each with the titled 'quiet' suggesting restraint, secrecy, suppressed memory and the ordered contraction of everyday experience to its workable details. Dreifus does not shy away from the dualities of good and evil and the ironies that complicated many experiences of survivors, as in “For Services Rendered” in which a high ranking Nazi’s wife intervenes on behalf of her pediatrician’s family even as her husband orders the deaths of others. In “Lebensraum” a young newly minted American soldier’s own escape from Germany made his supervision of kitchen worker German POWs a painful challenge to his dogged efforts to normalize as an American. In “Floating” the excruciating uncertainty of a risky pregnancy takes on deeper layers of agony in the grandmother-to-be whose family history of loss and uncertainty left her constantly needing the reassurance of ‘everything will be all right.’ Finally, in “The Quiet American, or how to Be a Good Guest,” the narrative voice behind all the stories comes out in measured dread of a visit to Germany and a (quiet) confrontation between contemporary perspectives of the meaning and primacy of death and destruction wrought by the War. The well-bred restraint borne of German breeding, repressed and managed memories and the desire to assimilate goes head to head in all these stories with the history of uncontrollable evil and losses that reverberate in increasingly nuanced ways through successive generations. These stories are great reads in their own right, but are especially poignant and meaningful as they reflect a common family experience. “Prosit”, Erika Dreifus.
November 16, 2016
One goodreads reviewer opens his review, "Erika Dreifus’ debut collection, Quiet Americans, feels like a roll of film shot with an old camera...By this I mean that these stories are not of nostalgic objects and characters, but that they are told through a mechanism that infuses a sense of a different period’s tooling." I've been thinking about Jacob's (the reviewer) reference to film (in black and white), and to quietness. The whole question of where memory lies--in images, in voices, in objects, in what is spoken or in palpable silences--haunts the collection. And the question of what "quiet" means within the pages of this book stays with me. Does the quietness of this book have to do with the way these stories focus on the work and domestic spheres, sibling friendships and rivalries, parent-child relationships, daily physical toil, mundane family matters (though the shattering of the holocaust is never far from the page?) Or is it referring to the way the families try to blend in, become part of the fabric of their new homes after fleeing Germany, so as not to draw attention to themselves. Though they do fiercely (and quietly?) hold onto cultural landmarks.
In the first story Dr. Ernst Weldman and his wife and daughters escape Germany 'just in time', but he doesn't have the courage to risk trying to save other members of his family. It doesn't matter how many miles lie between him and Germany, or how many years go by. The past he experiences and the one he escapes intertwine and remain present within him.
And then there is Karoline Frieberg, who can't escape the prison of her own sense of failure and the cloying and occasionally sinister family dynamics, a family in which two sisters, Karoline and Emma, seem to be fighting their own kind of small, strange war, with themselves, with each other. Karoline's son Josef is raised to some degree by Emma, and Emma has the opportunity to move past her resentment and jealousy (?). In the end, because of their extreme differences, neither manages to take care of him. At times it feels like a fable about all that can go wrong in a situation with two siblings if one is over-ly tender and the other overly-harsh. I like that fabular feel and also the way time moves slow and fast, drops down and zooms in on certain moments and then takes off and moves quickly through generations, slides through one war and edges toward the next. And this family, despite all of its narrative importance, gets no special treatment during war-time. Or, the war doesn't stop for them. And Emma, despite her toughness, is vulnerable to war and calamity. The shifting movement between the extreme close-up and the extreme long shot keeps a productive tension and makes space for the many modes the narrative engages. Each story part fable, part family memoir, part excavation. The narrator, at times, speaks directly to us, each story connecting to the next through the characters. because of their relation to the author or because of the narrator's voice.
I wonder if Dreifus chose the title in any relationship to Greene's "The Quiet American." I haven't read it, and they are in many ways un-similar, but are both about war and ethical questions/internal and social dilemmas. One GR reviewer says of Graham Green's novel: "It hits on the complexities of war; the complexity of morals: how it's impossible to stay neutral forever on such matters when you’re directly involved." Perhaps Dreifus's book is less interested in the question of should Ernst Weldman have done more to save his sister than how did his decision get carried, however quietly, into his future (in which the past always is living) and into his childrens' futures. As in many stories in which the horrors of world war two are alive, it seems that the familial silences which are meant to keep brokenness from increasing its entropic velocities, instead, perhaps, keep people from finding a way toward intimacy and understanding. But what are people to do with the trauma, terror and loss that enfolds them? They try to go on to forge "normal" lives. But this war can't possibly end. It never really ends, because it lives on in the proximity of death, loss of loved ones and the constant small flutter of nearness to disaster. And it lives on in a world in which many of the same battles are still being fought.
In any case, I loved this little book and appreciate narrative confidence, and natural-feeling intimacy with details of time and place.
As Jacob the gr reviewer says. "Quiet Americans is unique and powerful reading. It slips in quietly, and resonates far beyond its spare and chosen language."
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
In the first story Dr. Ernst Weldman and his wife and daughters escape Germany 'just in time', but he doesn't have the courage to risk trying to save other members of his family. It doesn't matter how many miles lie between him and Germany, or how many years go by. The past he experiences and the one he escapes intertwine and remain present within him.
And then there is Karoline Frieberg, who can't escape the prison of her own sense of failure and the cloying and occasionally sinister family dynamics, a family in which two sisters, Karoline and Emma, seem to be fighting their own kind of small, strange war, with themselves, with each other. Karoline's son Josef is raised to some degree by Emma, and Emma has the opportunity to move past her resentment and jealousy (?). In the end, because of their extreme differences, neither manages to take care of him. At times it feels like a fable about all that can go wrong in a situation with two siblings if one is over-ly tender and the other overly-harsh. I like that fabular feel and also the way time moves slow and fast, drops down and zooms in on certain moments and then takes off and moves quickly through generations, slides through one war and edges toward the next. And this family, despite all of its narrative importance, gets no special treatment during war-time. Or, the war doesn't stop for them. And Emma, despite her toughness, is vulnerable to war and calamity. The shifting movement between the extreme close-up and the extreme long shot keeps a productive tension and makes space for the many modes the narrative engages. Each story part fable, part family memoir, part excavation. The narrator, at times, speaks directly to us, each story connecting to the next through the characters. because of their relation to the author or because of the narrator's voice.
I wonder if Dreifus chose the title in any relationship to Greene's "The Quiet American." I haven't read it, and they are in many ways un-similar, but are both about war and ethical questions/internal and social dilemmas. One GR reviewer says of Graham Green's novel: "It hits on the complexities of war; the complexity of morals: how it's impossible to stay neutral forever on such matters when you’re directly involved." Perhaps Dreifus's book is less interested in the question of should Ernst Weldman have done more to save his sister than how did his decision get carried, however quietly, into his future (in which the past always is living) and into his childrens' futures. As in many stories in which the horrors of world war two are alive, it seems that the familial silences which are meant to keep brokenness from increasing its entropic velocities, instead, perhaps, keep people from finding a way toward intimacy and understanding. But what are people to do with the trauma, terror and loss that enfolds them? They try to go on to forge "normal" lives. But this war can't possibly end. It never really ends, because it lives on in the proximity of death, loss of loved ones and the constant small flutter of nearness to disaster. And it lives on in a world in which many of the same battles are still being fought.
In any case, I loved this little book and appreciate narrative confidence, and natural-feeling intimacy with details of time and place.
As Jacob the gr reviewer says. "Quiet Americans is unique and powerful reading. It slips in quietly, and resonates far beyond its spare and chosen language."
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
March 29, 2011
Erika Dreifus’ debut collection, Quiet Americans, feels like a roll of film shot with an old camera, not a 1970’s Nikon, but a prewar Leica II with a collapsible lens, a separate viewfinder and rangefinder, and a delicately hand-cut leader on the film so that the canister will load appropriately through the bottom of the camera body. By this I mean that these stories are not of nostalgic objects and characters, but that they are told through a mechanism that infuses a sense of a different period’s tooling. The stories, though they create an ellipsis around the greatest unrest that their subjects might ever encounter, the Holocaust, are, like the book’s title, quiet. This is a remarkable feat, lending the collection, cumulatively, a power and gravity much larger than its parts, or tone, would imply.
The collection works chronologically, documenting shtetl and Berliner life of several Jewish families in the decades preceding the Holocaust. In “Matrilineal Descent,” we learn of the three main characters’ respective escape, natural death, and deportation in summary in the story’s denouement. The book then tells stories of recent Jewish emigrants fighting with the Americans against their once-was countrymen. Here, too, Dreifus avoids the active conflicts of the war. Instead, “Lebensraum” tells of Josef Freiburg assigned to guard a group of German prisoners because he speaks their language. This is one of the truly standout stories in the collection. The German prisoners like Josef. Geographically displaced from the conflict, their genocidal ideologies seemingly, and believably, disappear. The story depicts stateside POW life as fairly pleasant, which, compared to life as a German soldier on the front in a totalitarian state, is fairly ecstatic – especially as their guard is a quiet, gentle man who speaks their language. But this like cannot be reciprocated. The camp is located in Clarinda, Iowa, and the town comes to somewhat adopt the prisoners. When Josef’s son is circumcised, and the prisoners wish to come, in an act that seems completely motivated by affection – here again, the simple mechanics of these stories, their will to resist certain kinds of complexities, works particularly well, because they allow the reader to believe the prisoners are in earnest, are human, do like Josef – Josef sends them away. This move points at a larger thematic truth: the Germans can stop being Nazis, stop being anti-Semites, cease genocidal activity; but it is too late; there is not turning back; the Jews cannot forgive them.
The final story in the collection, “Mishpocha” works in the same way. In it, David’s mother, a Holocaust survivor dies. His parents have never spoken about their experiences in the camps, and David is eager for information that would give form to his heritage and cumulative past. To this end, he gets a DNA test in the interest of discovering other surviving strands of his family. He learns, instead, that he isn’t biologically related to his parents. While the story of his adoption, when finally told, feels like something out of Mad Men, the fact of his adoption is a powerful metaphor. Not only does David lack access to the stories of a defining moment in his parents’ life, not only are the remaining strands of his family presumably deceased, but it turns out that in a genetic sense, his parents have not survived the Holocaust. In this way, David manages to occupy both the role of the child of a people irrevocably changed, altered lost, a child cut off from his heritage, lineage, extended family tree; but he also becomes the cuckoo bird egg opportunistically filling a void made by Nazi success.
Quiet Americans is unique and powerful reading. It slips in quietly, and resonates far beyond its spare and chosen language.
The collection works chronologically, documenting shtetl and Berliner life of several Jewish families in the decades preceding the Holocaust. In “Matrilineal Descent,” we learn of the three main characters’ respective escape, natural death, and deportation in summary in the story’s denouement. The book then tells stories of recent Jewish emigrants fighting with the Americans against their once-was countrymen. Here, too, Dreifus avoids the active conflicts of the war. Instead, “Lebensraum” tells of Josef Freiburg assigned to guard a group of German prisoners because he speaks their language. This is one of the truly standout stories in the collection. The German prisoners like Josef. Geographically displaced from the conflict, their genocidal ideologies seemingly, and believably, disappear. The story depicts stateside POW life as fairly pleasant, which, compared to life as a German soldier on the front in a totalitarian state, is fairly ecstatic – especially as their guard is a quiet, gentle man who speaks their language. But this like cannot be reciprocated. The camp is located in Clarinda, Iowa, and the town comes to somewhat adopt the prisoners. When Josef’s son is circumcised, and the prisoners wish to come, in an act that seems completely motivated by affection – here again, the simple mechanics of these stories, their will to resist certain kinds of complexities, works particularly well, because they allow the reader to believe the prisoners are in earnest, are human, do like Josef – Josef sends them away. This move points at a larger thematic truth: the Germans can stop being Nazis, stop being anti-Semites, cease genocidal activity; but it is too late; there is not turning back; the Jews cannot forgive them.
The final story in the collection, “Mishpocha” works in the same way. In it, David’s mother, a Holocaust survivor dies. His parents have never spoken about their experiences in the camps, and David is eager for information that would give form to his heritage and cumulative past. To this end, he gets a DNA test in the interest of discovering other surviving strands of his family. He learns, instead, that he isn’t biologically related to his parents. While the story of his adoption, when finally told, feels like something out of Mad Men, the fact of his adoption is a powerful metaphor. Not only does David lack access to the stories of a defining moment in his parents’ life, not only are the remaining strands of his family presumably deceased, but it turns out that in a genetic sense, his parents have not survived the Holocaust. In this way, David manages to occupy both the role of the child of a people irrevocably changed, altered lost, a child cut off from his heritage, lineage, extended family tree; but he also becomes the cuckoo bird egg opportunistically filling a void made by Nazi success.
Quiet Americans is unique and powerful reading. It slips in quietly, and resonates far beyond its spare and chosen language.
September 14, 2013
For all its quietness, this book delivers a punch. Of the eight stories, the first four are superb. "Matrilineal Descent" is as good as, if not better than, anything I've read in the New Yorker. "For Services Rendered" deals with its main character's painful ambivalence about the highranking Nazi's wife in wartime and postwar Germany--the wife who effectively saved his family's life while watching her husband exterminate his extended family and six million others--in an extraordinarily delicate and empathetic way. Dreifus has a pitch-perfect style, not a word out of place, the sobriety of the prose tinged with a knowledge of history that often makes its placidity feel almost ironic--it's like whispering rather than screaming in the face of outrage, and all the more forceful for that. When the stories reach the present day, they lose some of their force and become just a bit tendentious and prosaic. But for those first four stories alone, I would recommend this book to all serious readers.
January 28, 2011
This collection of short stories explores the experiences of German Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust. The settings range from a small German village on the edge of the Black Forest in 1888, to a prisoner-of-war camp in rural Illinois in 1944, to Munich in 2004. Dreifus subtly reminds us of the historical and cultural context – in lightning-flash images of Kristallnacht, or the appearance of a minor character of startling historical importance, or the surprising appearance of Black September in a story about something else. What I loved most about Quiet Americans is its bigheartedness. These stories are understated and full of surprises; they are about generosity and forgiveness as well as atrocity, about kindness as well as survival.
March 17, 2012
"Quiet Americans" is a beautifully written book that is actually a collection of short stories. The common thread that ties the chapters together is the Holocaust. Virtually all of the stories are connected by a common family lineage and they demonstrate the lingering impact of that horrific time even to present times. Readers born soon after the Holocaust (as I was) or whose families were directly and tragically impacted by it (as mine was) can especially relate to the people that Erika Dreifus brings to life. However, one doesn't have to be Jewish to appreciate these stories which express the ultimate triumph of basic, decent humanity over unbridled evil. Although this is a basically a compilation of stories about survival and the lingering impact of the Holocaust on a Jewish family, the characters that Dreifus has created serve as a metaphor for all the good 'quiet Americans,' who ultimately defeated the Axis powers and survived Nazi tyranny; who went on and lived their lives to the fullest. In their quiet way, they represent mankind at its very best, starting from a world at its very worst. Well done Erika Dreifus!
March 13, 2013
A powerful collection of short stories. While each vignette stands on its own, they all form a cohesive, striking portrait spanning several generations. Characters, like Dr. Weldmann, are faced with crucial decisions: to speak out or to stay silent. Dreifus's narrators may vary in point of view but they never fail to draw us in quickly. The narrator of "Matrilineal Descent" breaks through that fourth wall to speak to its readers who, like the narrator, may have researched their ancestors only to find indeterminate statements “für tot erklärkt seit..” Refreshing to pick up a book by a young US writer with a gift not only for English but for other languages. I look forward to Ms. Dreifus's next book.
January 22, 2013
This story collection focuses on several Jewish families living before, during and after the Holocaust. Most of the stories are interconnected.
May 1, 2016
A quick, engaging read. But I think, in large part, the impetus to continue was with the conundrum these protagonists faced, rather than with their actual character development.
My favorite story might still be the first one, "For Services Rendered," involving the wife of a high up Nazi officer convincing her husband to get her Jewish doctor and his family out of Germany before it was too late. Years later, after they'd lost the rest of their families to the Shoah, the doctor struggled with his conscience as this Nazi wife was put on trial for "profiteering." I found this line to be particularly haunting, after the protagonist read a clinical news article about the Final Solution: "....if only he had been able to open his mouth and reply: 'Your Aunt Lise? Ah, well--she was sent to the Eastern Countries for extermination.'"
Several other stories chronicle the Freiburg family, starting in the late 19th century in their small German village on the edge of the Black Forest. I appreciated Dreifus's writing style in "Matrilineal Descent," not just the first person plural, but the use of humor, like when they are judging the protagonist for "abandoning" her sister: "Was it really so difficult to imagine how much more melancholic Karoline must have felt--for after a time the villagers seemed to acquire a surprising degree of clinical awareness that had eluded them throughout Karoline's illness--left in her dark bedroom, in the bed that was never made, the air heavier and more oppressive as the summer wore on?"
The Freiburgs dealt with many hypothetical tangential issues relating to the Shoah--immigrant Josef had to supervise German prisoners during the war in "Lebensraum"; he and his wife unwittingly dared to re-visit Germany during the 1972 Olympics when the Israeli athletes were murdered, in "Homecomings"; several decades later, in the titular story, one of their granddaughters, on tour in Germany, grapples with her identity as an American and a Jew while the guide bemoans Allies bombing buildings, as if that was the worst thing to happen during the war.
I think the weakest story was probably the last one, "Mishpocha." The Hebrew word for "family," it's much longer than the other stories and mostly concerns itself with the protagonist's obsession with the Jewish genealogical internet in order to find out about his parents' Shoah pasts, only to reveal a sudden, largely unexplored twist at the very end. It's also kind of like the story, "Floating," mostly about the protagonist's daughter's trouble with conceiving (while the protagonist remembers how easy it was for her, and in a much less hyper-medical time,) but at the very end it slides into a family argument about a famous antisemitic piece of poetry. I was kind of more ok with this ending, though, because in real life, random emotions often barge in to "the narrative" of life.
All in all, a quick, enjoyable collection. Glad I finally got around to it!
My favorite story might still be the first one, "For Services Rendered," involving the wife of a high up Nazi officer convincing her husband to get her Jewish doctor and his family out of Germany before it was too late. Years later, after they'd lost the rest of their families to the Shoah, the doctor struggled with his conscience as this Nazi wife was put on trial for "profiteering." I found this line to be particularly haunting, after the protagonist read a clinical news article about the Final Solution: "....if only he had been able to open his mouth and reply: 'Your Aunt Lise? Ah, well--she was sent to the Eastern Countries for extermination.'"
Several other stories chronicle the Freiburg family, starting in the late 19th century in their small German village on the edge of the Black Forest. I appreciated Dreifus's writing style in "Matrilineal Descent," not just the first person plural, but the use of humor, like when they are judging the protagonist for "abandoning" her sister: "Was it really so difficult to imagine how much more melancholic Karoline must have felt--for after a time the villagers seemed to acquire a surprising degree of clinical awareness that had eluded them throughout Karoline's illness--left in her dark bedroom, in the bed that was never made, the air heavier and more oppressive as the summer wore on?"
The Freiburgs dealt with many hypothetical tangential issues relating to the Shoah--immigrant Josef had to supervise German prisoners during the war in "Lebensraum"; he and his wife unwittingly dared to re-visit Germany during the 1972 Olympics when the Israeli athletes were murdered, in "Homecomings"; several decades later, in the titular story, one of their granddaughters, on tour in Germany, grapples with her identity as an American and a Jew while the guide bemoans Allies bombing buildings, as if that was the worst thing to happen during the war.
I think the weakest story was probably the last one, "Mishpocha." The Hebrew word for "family," it's much longer than the other stories and mostly concerns itself with the protagonist's obsession with the Jewish genealogical internet in order to find out about his parents' Shoah pasts, only to reveal a sudden, largely unexplored twist at the very end. It's also kind of like the story, "Floating," mostly about the protagonist's daughter's trouble with conceiving (while the protagonist remembers how easy it was for her, and in a much less hyper-medical time,) but at the very end it slides into a family argument about a famous antisemitic piece of poetry. I was kind of more ok with this ending, though, because in real life, random emotions often barge in to "the narrative" of life.
All in all, a quick, enjoyable collection. Glad I finally got around to it!
April 24, 2012
I read this when it first came out and decided to reread it in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's always a treat to revisit a good collection of stories and see things I missed the first time around.
These stories are linked generationally and thematically around—but not specifically about—the Holocaust. More, I'd say they are about Jewish identity, and the long and deep scar of the Holocaust. In one story, "The Quiet American," there is a line about the narrator's only remembered German word: "It's Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It's a word that mean, roughly, "coming to terms with the past." And each of the stories attempts this, from different eras and perspectives.
There are few definitives here. Nazis=evil? Yes, but sometimes they may warn a doctor to relocate his family from Germany—soon. Sometimes they even offer a drink and cigar, one of those civilities between gentlemen, even between Nazi and Jew. Sometimes they are young farmboys and POW kitchen boys who have grown fond enough of their Jewish supervisor to wish to witness his son's bris. And while we might assume that women are the gentler sex, here, especially in the earlier stories, they seem a little sharper, a little more skeptical or even unforgiving, while the men seem quieter and perhaps more able to consider the complications they face without seeing them only in black and white.
This is a lovely, thought-provoking, and sometimes devastating collection. The final story, "Mishpocha," is killer. Even though I read it before, and even though I knew what was coming, when I finished reading it (on a ferry on the way to work) I had to cover my face. Absolutely killer.
These stories are linked generationally and thematically around—but not specifically about—the Holocaust. More, I'd say they are about Jewish identity, and the long and deep scar of the Holocaust. In one story, "The Quiet American," there is a line about the narrator's only remembered German word: "It's Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It's a word that mean, roughly, "coming to terms with the past." And each of the stories attempts this, from different eras and perspectives.
There are few definitives here. Nazis=evil? Yes, but sometimes they may warn a doctor to relocate his family from Germany—soon. Sometimes they even offer a drink and cigar, one of those civilities between gentlemen, even between Nazi and Jew. Sometimes they are young farmboys and POW kitchen boys who have grown fond enough of their Jewish supervisor to wish to witness his son's bris. And while we might assume that women are the gentler sex, here, especially in the earlier stories, they seem a little sharper, a little more skeptical or even unforgiving, while the men seem quieter and perhaps more able to consider the complications they face without seeing them only in black and white.
This is a lovely, thought-provoking, and sometimes devastating collection. The final story, "Mishpocha," is killer. Even though I read it before, and even though I knew what was coming, when I finished reading it (on a ferry on the way to work) I had to cover my face. Absolutely killer.
June 20, 2012
This collection of stories moves from Europe to America (and sometimes back again), following lives that become enmeshed in the Holocaust, either directly or via family legacy. Dreyfus has a gift for coming up with fresh but completely plausible scenarios that highlight the existential anxieties of Jewish Americans in the age of Hitler and afterwards: a German-born G.I. who fled the Nazis and now finds out his army assignment is to train captured Germans to work in his mess hall ("Lebensraum"); the son of camp survivors, who gets a mind-bending surprise when he undergoes DNA testing in search of information about lost relatives; a woman, visiting Stuttgart in 2004 and wondering what to say to a tour guide who harps endlessly on the destruction of property by Allied bombings ("The Quiet American"). The Americans in these stories are quiet in more than one sense--their lives, for the most part, are safe and comfortable; as they get older, even the ones who just barely survived the Nazis no longer scream in the night. But they are also quiet because they don't want to talk about what they've been through--or because they're afraid, like the Stuttgart tourist, of seeming to make too much of a fuss about past history, of incurring the resentment and wrath that Jews often feel threatened with. Deceptively simple, Dreyfus's tales exhibit a moral poise, empathy, and willingness, finally, to pass judgement.
July 12, 2012
"Why had he bothered to discuss this? Always, there had been so much about him she hadn't understood. Always, something about her heart had remained unyielding, beyond his comprehension. But that was the point. So much remained beyond his comprehension."
~ from "For Services Rendered
Erika Dreifus' collection of stories is aptly titled, as it is a quiet but powerful read. Her stories, like "For Services Rendered", reveal complex characters who unravel a mixture of complexities in their histories. In "Homecoming", Nelly Freiburg grapples with the decision to return to her homeland, to places of her youth. In "Mishpocha", David Kaufmann pursues mysteries behind his identity and uncovers the unexpected, asking the question, in a sense, of what exactly defines us. It's clear why this book has received so many accolades, as readers gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be Jewish and an American and a survivor.
~ from "For Services Rendered
Erika Dreifus' collection of stories is aptly titled, as it is a quiet but powerful read. Her stories, like "For Services Rendered", reveal complex characters who unravel a mixture of complexities in their histories. In "Homecoming", Nelly Freiburg grapples with the decision to return to her homeland, to places of her youth. In "Mishpocha", David Kaufmann pursues mysteries behind his identity and uncovers the unexpected, asking the question, in a sense, of what exactly defines us. It's clear why this book has received so many accolades, as readers gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be Jewish and an American and a survivor.
November 25, 2012
Some of the stories in Quiet Americans are connected and interrelated, but not all of them. Each individual story brings an in depth look into the minds and emotions of those who have struggled with the after-effects and after-affects of the Shoah/Holocaust, and those who have struggled with identity. Thought-provoking is an understatement in describing Quiet Americans. Each story is sensitively written, but filled with a quiet strength. Erika Dreifus has written an insightful and strong book, and shows the reader how emotions have a distinct and definite influence on the way we choose, or not choose, to remember the past in order to survive the traumas inflicted on us. Her word paintings are vivid, her prose beautiful, and filled with the resounding force of memory, its suppression of events, and its remembrance of times past.
Yet, within the strong imagery, lies a resonance of dignity, sparks of hope, and inspiring stories, that I highly recommend.
Yet, within the strong imagery, lies a resonance of dignity, sparks of hope, and inspiring stories, that I highly recommend.
August 21, 2013
Quiet Americans is a series of short stories interconnected in that they relate the story of Eastern European Jewish families through several decades both before and after the Holocaust, both in Europe and in the United States, following the World War II and immigration. Particularly compelling to me about this collection is the luster of the every day lives of these families, which serve as the lens through which the reader experiences the lead-up to and aftermath of Nazi occupation, deportation and concentration camps, and the war. These stories offer portraits of love, loss, dignity and calm through incredibly trying and in many cases devastating circumstances.
February 11, 2011
I loved this book. Erika Dreifus understand the intricacies of the human psyche and weaves them into her stories with an expert hand. This collection draws you in, evokes emotion and makes you ponder ideas and ideals. Short stories? Yes. But there is so much more within the pages of Quiet Americans, as the stories are intertwined through generations. This book takes an old and new look at the Holocaust from then until now, in ways I’d not thought of before. Thought-provoking and compelling.
March 2, 2013
I grew up in post-war Germany, as an American Foreign Service child, and the terrible mystery of what happened there for the generations before my arrival needs to be documented now that the silent decades are over. It is the work of the courageous and curious. Erika Dreifus’ stories are that. Legacies of shame and bravery are brought forward into the 21st Century in The Quiet Americans. Dreifus takes it on and writes nuanced tales of the transfer of difficult knowledge and emotion across generations. The art of the stories is their grace, both understated and powerful.
May 31, 2013
I know Erika Dreifus from her blogs and a short story that appeared on JewishFiction.net, but I had yet to read her book. I finally did, and I'm glad. Each tale in the story collection stands alone, but when read together helps develop the tale of American Jewry since the Holocaust. The standouts are the title tale "Quiet Americans" -- written adeptly in the 2nd person POV -- and the final one, "Mishpocha." I was also intrigued by the first story; I wondered how much of the story had a historical basis.
September 19, 2011
Skilled storytelling with lots of heart. Erika Dreifus' characters face some of the most difficult challenges this world could throw at people. And in these well-drawn snapshots of the characters' lives, their responses draw each reader into the story to feel the reverberations in his or her own life. Containing aching loss and joy, these stories are both particular to Jewish history and contemporary culture, as well as universal.
Read
February 16, 2012A Sophie Brody Medal honor title.
This little book of short stories is a gem that anyone can read and enjoy. Its straightforward writing and understandable stories about German Jews and their descendants bring us into the everyday lives of Jewish Americans. Some stories are interrelated, but they stand alone in their own right.
For the complete list of 2012 Sophie Brody honor titles, please visit RUSA Awards 2012
This little book of short stories is a gem that anyone can read and enjoy. Its straightforward writing and understandable stories about German Jews and their descendants bring us into the everyday lives of Jewish Americans. Some stories are interrelated, but they stand alone in their own right.
For the complete list of 2012 Sophie Brody honor titles, please visit RUSA Awards 2012
December 2, 2012
Erika Dreifus’ "small" stories—tender, pitch perfect treatments of human strength and frailty—are little jewels occurring within the big events taking place in German-Jewish communities before and after World War II. If I have to pick a favorite story, it is “Lebensraum," on the strength of its staying with me. The book is a mere 162 pages with just seven stories, well worth the afternoon it will take to read.
March 21, 2013
Normally I dismiss short story collections because they do not allow me to become involved in the characters and the plot. Quiet Americans was different. All the stories revolved around the individuals and families coping with life before, during, and after the Holocaust. The characters were real, multi-dimensional, and the stories moving. Like others, I look forward to reading more from this author.
July 6, 2011
I don't read a lot of short story collections because I have a hard time connecting with the characters over just a few pages. This collection was very moving because the author quickly makes the reader care about the people and their stories, which are really about identity, history and family ties.
February 29, 2012
Simply put, what a delightful read. The grace and elegance that Dreifus weaves through her stories and characters is first rate. This book came in the mail on Thursday. Friday evening after a long day, I sat down and read it cover to cover, unable to put it down. I look forward to the many times I am sure to read it again.
March 29, 2011
This is a wonderful, evocative collection of linked stories dealing with people who have been intimately connected with--and affected by--the Holocaust. Sparely written, unsentimental, deeply moving and affecting.
December 3, 2012
Quiet Americans is a gem of a book. It's rare to discover such a well-crafted and profound work of literature in in contemporary fiction. Its stories are beautifully crafted, delicate yet powerful. They took hold of me from page one, and stayed with me long after the end.
March 7, 2013
Finished this book rather quickly - it's a short read but keeps you captivated throughout. While they are individual short stories within, they each at some point intertwine with another. Will definitely pass along to my younger relatives who are learning and discussing the holocaust.
Read
September 23, 2011Shelf Unbound talks with Erika Dreifus about her new book of short stories, Quiet Americans,published by Last Light Studio in the June/July 2011 issue. http://www.shelfmediagroup.com/staff_...
January 2, 2012
Erika Dreifus is a fabulous writer. I loved these stories and they deserve to be read. And Dreifus deserves a lot of literary love for these gems.
February 25, 2016
I won this book through Goodreads. This was a really good book. Very poignant and heartwarming.
December 27, 2017
Glass breaks easily. It’s whole one moment, and then it shatters. That’s a small part of what Kristallnacht – the night of broken glass that in many ways marked the beginning of the Holocaust – represented: a breaking that could never be put together again.
Erika Dreifus’s remarkable linked collection of short stories focuses on that facet of what the Holocaust meant. In the wake of so much breakage, so many things torn into pieces, it falls to the second and third generations to make sense of the fragments that remain. None of her characters navigate any part of the 60 years after World War II without bearing its scars, and none can really ignore its shadow.
One of the many subtle insights here is that the legacy of the Holocaust seems to grow over generations. Only one of these stories is set during the War and the immediacy of the staggering disaster has a different feel than the later ones. That story, “For Services Rendered,” may well be the strongest in this uniformly strong collection. It tells the story of a German pediatrician who, because he has cared for Goering’s daughter, is able to escape the world that consumes almost everyone else he knew. After the war, after the Nuremberg trials, he confronts the difficult question: while Goering’s widow was a princess of the Reich and benefited from its evils, she also saved his and his family’s life. She is of evil on a staggering scale, but she is also a person, a woman who showed him a necessary mercy, and he has to decide whether to intervene in her trial.
Most of the remaining stories turn out to be linked, tracing a broken family as it acculturates to American life. There’s a generation of refugees, a generation of their children who have to care for aging parents afraid to go back for visits to a Europe that is eerily familiar, and a generation after them who slide easily into upper-middle-class careers but still find themselves haunted by a past they cannot really know. (The final story, “Mispocha,” does a particularly careful job of that, giving us a middle-aged man who uses the new tool of DNA analysis to uncover a mystery his survivor parents never revealed to him.)
What’s striking in the linkedness – and, unless I am missing a subtle connection, the middle six are connected while the first and last are not – is that the running together of generational perspective is part of the real power here. We see multiple generations experience the challenge of watching parents age and feel children supplant them. Even as the decades pass, though, the Holocaust brings about new challenges, new reminders that they are the heirs of a broken past they cannot hope to repair.
In “Lebensraum,” the second earliest chronological story here, a refugee finds himself working in the middle of Iowa. He’s the only Jew for hundreds of miles, and, in his role as director of a prisoner-of-war camp kitchen, he comes to supervise prisoners who wore Nazi uniforms. It’s a balance for him, remembering his lost family and imagining a future for his new child, but it’s also a promise that American has given him enough “room to live,” enough space to shape a new life separate from but inflected by the old.
In “Homecomings” and “The Quiet American” – two stories that particularly talk to each other – we see women of different generations return to Europe to try to make sense of how their private and global worlds have changed. In the first, the protagonist has the bad timing to arrive in Germany during the 1972 Olympic massacre, a visceral reminder that hatred and fear of Jews persists. In the second, a young woman is troubled to find a tour guide who talks more sadly of the loss of German infrastructure than of the murdered millions. The two stories make a powerful diptych: the same experience mediated by characters from different eras but delivered with Dreifus’s particular skill and supple voice.
That generational conversation may be clearest of all in “Floating” when a woman worries over possible complications in her daughter’s pregnancy. At the same time, she recalls her own, recalls the innocence of “floating” in joy and, perhaps, naivete. The irony seems to be that, in a potentially more dangerous time, she survived without being fully aware of the dangers. Today, her daughter and potential grandchild have more access to life-saving technology but also more awareness of all that could go wrong.
It’s surprising as you read this – and I hope ‘you’ will – how easily and quickly it goes. Each story is powerful on its own terms, and yet they align with one another in powerful ways too. The effect is that this reads in some ways like a novel but with between-story opportunities to take a quick breath.
I happen to be friends with Erika, but the disclaimer seems unimportant because I got to know her as a result of reading her work. She is a serious talent, and this book deserves a wide and appreciative audience.
Erika Dreifus’s remarkable linked collection of short stories focuses on that facet of what the Holocaust meant. In the wake of so much breakage, so many things torn into pieces, it falls to the second and third generations to make sense of the fragments that remain. None of her characters navigate any part of the 60 years after World War II without bearing its scars, and none can really ignore its shadow.
One of the many subtle insights here is that the legacy of the Holocaust seems to grow over generations. Only one of these stories is set during the War and the immediacy of the staggering disaster has a different feel than the later ones. That story, “For Services Rendered,” may well be the strongest in this uniformly strong collection. It tells the story of a German pediatrician who, because he has cared for Goering’s daughter, is able to escape the world that consumes almost everyone else he knew. After the war, after the Nuremberg trials, he confronts the difficult question: while Goering’s widow was a princess of the Reich and benefited from its evils, she also saved his and his family’s life. She is of evil on a staggering scale, but she is also a person, a woman who showed him a necessary mercy, and he has to decide whether to intervene in her trial.
Most of the remaining stories turn out to be linked, tracing a broken family as it acculturates to American life. There’s a generation of refugees, a generation of their children who have to care for aging parents afraid to go back for visits to a Europe that is eerily familiar, and a generation after them who slide easily into upper-middle-class careers but still find themselves haunted by a past they cannot really know. (The final story, “Mispocha,” does a particularly careful job of that, giving us a middle-aged man who uses the new tool of DNA analysis to uncover a mystery his survivor parents never revealed to him.)
What’s striking in the linkedness – and, unless I am missing a subtle connection, the middle six are connected while the first and last are not – is that the running together of generational perspective is part of the real power here. We see multiple generations experience the challenge of watching parents age and feel children supplant them. Even as the decades pass, though, the Holocaust brings about new challenges, new reminders that they are the heirs of a broken past they cannot hope to repair.
In “Lebensraum,” the second earliest chronological story here, a refugee finds himself working in the middle of Iowa. He’s the only Jew for hundreds of miles, and, in his role as director of a prisoner-of-war camp kitchen, he comes to supervise prisoners who wore Nazi uniforms. It’s a balance for him, remembering his lost family and imagining a future for his new child, but it’s also a promise that American has given him enough “room to live,” enough space to shape a new life separate from but inflected by the old.
In “Homecomings” and “The Quiet American” – two stories that particularly talk to each other – we see women of different generations return to Europe to try to make sense of how their private and global worlds have changed. In the first, the protagonist has the bad timing to arrive in Germany during the 1972 Olympic massacre, a visceral reminder that hatred and fear of Jews persists. In the second, a young woman is troubled to find a tour guide who talks more sadly of the loss of German infrastructure than of the murdered millions. The two stories make a powerful diptych: the same experience mediated by characters from different eras but delivered with Dreifus’s particular skill and supple voice.
That generational conversation may be clearest of all in “Floating” when a woman worries over possible complications in her daughter’s pregnancy. At the same time, she recalls her own, recalls the innocence of “floating” in joy and, perhaps, naivete. The irony seems to be that, in a potentially more dangerous time, she survived without being fully aware of the dangers. Today, her daughter and potential grandchild have more access to life-saving technology but also more awareness of all that could go wrong.
It’s surprising as you read this – and I hope ‘you’ will – how easily and quickly it goes. Each story is powerful on its own terms, and yet they align with one another in powerful ways too. The effect is that this reads in some ways like a novel but with between-story opportunities to take a quick breath.
I happen to be friends with Erika, but the disclaimer seems unimportant because I got to know her as a result of reading her work. She is a serious talent, and this book deserves a wide and appreciative audience.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews