(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

I've talked about the following here before, the tricky question of just how much Holocaust literature is enough, the delicate balance between encouraging all surviving Holocaust victims to write down their stories versus just how many of these stories a person can read before they all start blurring together in one's head; and the reason I've talked about this before is that I'm always receiving more of these middling-quality Holocaust memoirs on what sometimes seems like a monthly basis, most of them from print-on-demand (or POD) company iUniverse, whose promotional staff has sent me something like 20 or 30 books in general over the last year, bless their postage-slave souls. Because in many ways, you could argue that such memoirs are exactly what POD companies are for, what they're in fact best at, for not only giving these survivors an excuse for sitting and writing their tales, but for making it easy and inexpensive for the couple of hundred people nationally who would be interested in reading it to get their hands on a copy; but as someone who's now read a dozen such books, take it from me when I say that unless an author is a particularly gifted one, all these memoirs of World War Two tend to blend together quite quickly, in that for the most part they are dry, journal-like accounts of events that happened to nearly six million other people back then in an almost identical fashion. And so it is with the latest of these memoirs to be sent to me, Marian Kampinski's Remember Me, in this case concerning the Jewish population of Lodz, Poland in the years right before and right after that country's Nazi takeover, riveting of course from a general standpoint but with few details you won't already come across in Schindler's List or Maus. It's one of those documents that will be cherished by her friends and family and appreciated by Holocaust scholars, competently written and not exactly a waste of time; but nonetheless, those without a personal interest in Kampinski's life can pretty easily skip it, and instead pick up any one of dozens of older, better projects concerning the same subject. It's not terrible, not great, certainly a book I'm glad exists, but one I don't recommend going out of your way to acquire.

Out of 10: 7.4 ( )