An interesting, well-written look of the son of Holocaust survivors who goes to Germany on an author's tour. He must confront his mixed feelings about the country that so forever altered his life. ( )

The author's parents were both in Nazi concentration camps, survived and before 1954 came to New York, where the author was born. He becomes interested in learning more about his parents' experiences, and does some book tours in Germany and tells of his attitude to Germany, which changes when he comes to know the country. The book is easy to read, and is of mild interest, though I was not impressed by the author's detailed account of his sex life--which added nothing to the book.. I could not find the book of any special significane. and thought my time could have been better spent.. ( )

Back in September of 2005 I received a rather desolate-sounding email from my friend Lev Raphael, who was on a book tour in Germany for Das deutsche Geld (the German edition of his novel The German Money): “Sick of tiny hotel rooms,” he wrote. “Sick of being alone. Sick of German breakfasts. Sick of beer.” I responded as my grandmother and mother would have done. I offered to send him sweet-potato pecan bread when he returned home. Because the natural response to any complaint in my family was “here, eat something.”

Looking back, I’m a little embarrassed at what must have seemed to Lev to be a rather glib response to what had been a very stressful trip for him. Little did I know that the seemingly inauspicious trip would be the beginning of a journey that would lead Lev here, to this book. I don’t think he knew either. At least, not at the point when, after a nightmare flight home, he wrote me and said, “I want to hide in bed for days.”

Lev and I have been corresponding for seven years now, although we have only met in person once. I call him my “literary pen pal” because he is one of the very few people on the planet who dares to recommend books to me, a career reader and bookseller. If you had asked me last month if I thought I knew Lev well, I would have said “sure, pretty well.”

Yet I was surprised by the man I met in Lev’s new memoir. His account of his return to Germany, his determination to discover what happened to his parents during the war, was relentless, honest, and often agonizing. I wasn’t surprised by the writing—I have always known Lev to be a fine, fine writer. But there are things in his memoir that I never imagined possible, and I was surprised, awed, that he had the strength to persevere in the task he set for himself, to trace his parents from concentration camp to concentration camp. Indeed, the first question I asked him in the following interview is one that simply burst out of me quite early when reading his story. “How could you go on?” How did you manage to keep looking, when each new discovery was horror after horror?

So yes, I’ve known Lev Raphael “pretty well” for quite awhile. But what I didn’t know, until I read this book, was how brave a man he really is.

Read the full interview