The Holocaust from a new perspective

books:


	• Jacob's Courage: A Holocaust Love Story Charles S Weinblatt MAZO PUBLISHERS, 2007 - 524 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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The Holocaust from a new perspective

This historic novel offers a well researched love store set in the middle of the horror that was Nazi Germany in the 30's and 40's. The book is well thought out and written but suffers somewhat from numerous typos/editing miscues. Hopefully a second edition will correct what the publisher missed to make it truly a thought provoking read. The historic references appear to be well researched. Hats off to a fine first effort from Mr. Weinblatt.

And I cried...

Although the characters in Jacob's Courage are fictional, they are based on real people. Weinblatt's characters take the reader on their journey from their pre-war Jewish community to the end of the war. The adversity they faced was real and the experiences they went through were all experiences someone went through. In order to write Jacob's Courage Weinblatt did a considerable amount of research.

I rarely read fiction but knew I had to read Jacob's Courage. This book brings the Holocaust to life and evokes emotions not found in many history books. Weaving together a story of love, passion, horror, and history, Weinblatt left nothing out. The book was difficult to read because it openly exposed the brutality and cruelty people were and are capable of. As a mother of a young child, I was especially saddened to read the experiences of families being torn apart at camps. A line was formed that contained the "very old, sick or very young. Children were crying and screaming for their mothers." Those that could not work were sent to this line and were kept there by guards with large barking dogs. This line went straight to the gas chamber. If that had been me, I realized that I would have been forced in one line and my daughter in the other. I cried at the thought and I cried knowing what these people had to go through. Weinblatt made the Holocaust very real and successfully pulled me into his novel.

Despite the few overlooked typos mentioned by other reviewers, I am left with a better understanding of this time in history thanks to Weinblatt. He did an amazing job writing a Holocaust history, and Jacob's Courage gives readers the opportunity to analyze examples of intolerance throughout history. Over sixty years later, people are still persecuted for their religious and political differences. Weinblatt asks, "Have we learned nothing from the mistakes of history?"

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Holocaust Revisited

'Jacob's Courage' is a love story embedded in one of the greatest disasters of human history--Hitler's Third Reich and the mass killing that attended it. This is a story of almost unrelieved horror. You hear, see and smell the murder of individuals and the destruction of a people. It isn't pretty. There's malevolence, pointless discrimination, abuse, rape, mass murder and more.

It is an excruciating tale, made all the more difficult by the fact that these things actually happened. The author, C.S. Weinblatt, has done an excellent job in making the reader relive the Holocaust. The question is, is the reader actually prepared to revisit--in graphic detail--one of the most horrific events in human history?

Ron Braithwaite, author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico

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Jacob's Courage Book Review

Book Review
By, Hindea Markowicz

Jacob's Courage
Charles Weinblatt
Mazo Publishers 2007

Jacob's Courage is a very well researched novel that vividly brings the realities of the Holocaust to life through the eyes of two people, Jacob, the title character, and Rachel, the girl he falls in love with as the war breaks out and eventually marries in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, only to be separated at deportation to Auschwitz.

The gripping epic story follows each of their paths from their pre-war Jewish community to their expulsions, their ghetto life, their separation via deportations, their experiences in slave labor camps, in death camps, in the resistance, on death marches, and their liberations and miraculous reunification. In each setting, the vivid portrayals of the travails of the principals and the other characters in the novel bring the experience of the Holocaust to life on a personal level. The book depicts the brutality of the Nazis and their henchmen, exposing the demonic and cruel nature of too many human beings during that era. The characters are faced with hard choices of life and death, betrayal and loyalty. The events of the novel are gut wrenching and heart rending.

The book could just as well been called Jacob and Rachel's Courage as the parallel stories of each of their experiences during the Holocaust exhibit equal measures of courage in the face of depravity and adversity that seems too incredible to believe were it not an accurate depiction of the reality of what took place in the heart of 20th century Europe. It well fulfills the role of good historical fiction by giving the reader the experience of living through an historical event by depicting the many aspects of life at that time through the experiences of the central and secondary characters. First time author Weinblatt is very successful in this regard. His Holocaust is very real and very accurate in the descriptions of the locales and the conditions of existence of each setting. The people that populate the novel are not merely two dimensional archetypes or clichés but fully formed humans with frailties and shortcomings in addition to positive qualities.

Although it is a novel, it is an excellent primer on the Holocaust. The reader will be left with a very accurate understanding of this cataclysmic time from a historical perspective, but with the additional emotions evoked that a dry history book cannot provide. Perhaps this is its greatest strength. Though the book is epic in length and scope, Weinblatt's characters and characterizations compel the reader to read onward. At the end of the read one feels both hope and admiration for the human spirit that can endure and survive the ordeals of the various victims depicted, although fictional but not unlike experiences endured by actual survivors, and disgust and despair with the dark side of the human spirit because the historical facts of the Holocaust in which the novel is set are all too true.

One unfortunate shortcoming is an excess of typos and word omissions representing significant editing shortcomings on the part of the publisher.

Hindea Markowicz is Director of the Ruth Fajerman Markowicz Holocaust Resource Center of Greater Toledo.

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"Jacob's Courage" is a beautiful love story set against the backdrop of the Holocaust. "Jacob's Courage" chronicles the dazzling beauty of passionate love and enduring bravery in a lurid world where the innocent are brutally murdered. In 1939, seventeen-year-old Austrians Jacob Silverman and Rachael Goldberg are bright, talented, and deeply in love. Because they are Jews, their families lose everything; their jobs, possessions and money, contact with loved ones, and finally their liberty at the hands of the Nazis. Jacob and Rachael "grow up" during the Holocaust. As teenagers, they survive the beatings, rapes, and murderous acts of the Nazis, enjoy the physical and spiritual pleasure of being in love and are able to become husband and wife in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, before being imprisoned in Auschwitz. Eventually Jacob and Rachael become Partisans to fight the Nazi enemy. While "Jacob's Courage" is a novel, the author, Charles Weinblatt, has based portions of the story on his mother's experience. Clara Volk Weinblatt was a childhood victim of pogroms in her Russian Jewish village. Much of Weinblatt's maternal extended family perished in the Holocaust. Great grandparents, great-aunts and uncles and many cousins disappeared into the void of Nazi annihilation. This book is dedicated to the 6,000,000 Jews who perished in the Holocaust. They have been lost, but will never be forgotten. "Jacob's Courage" is Holocaust literature for adult readers.

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