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Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) | 
 enlarge | Author: Ruth Kluger
Creator: Lore Segal
Publisher: The Feminist Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 24504
Media: Paperback
Pages: 216
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 1558614362
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5318092
EAN: 9781558614369
ASIN: 1558614362
Publication Date: April 1, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
"Instead of God I believe in ghosts," writes the literary scholar Ruth Kluger in this harrowing memoir of life under the yellow star, a controversial bestseller in Germany. Born in Vienna, Kluger somehow survived a girlhood spent in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Gross-Rosen. Some of the lessons she imparts are surprising, as when she argues, against other historians, that the female camp guards were far more humane than their male counterparts, and when she admits that she has difficulty today queuing in line, a constant of camp life, "out of revulsion for the bovine activity of simply standing." Her memories of her youth are punctuated by sharp reflections on the meaning of the Shoah and how it should best be memorialized in a time when ever fewer survivors are left to act as witnesses. Those reflections are often angry--"Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps," she writes, recalling an argument with a naive German graduate student, "and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for?" But they are constantly provocative, too. Though readers will doubtless take issue with some of her conclusions, Kluger's insistent memoir merits a wide audience. --Gregory McNamee
Product Description
Now in paperback, this European bestseller won huge -acclaim from U.S. critics, Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post Book World declared this memoir of a Holocaust girlhood and a life reclaimed "one of the best books of 2001 . . . a book of surpassing, and at times brutal, honesty. . . . Among the many reasons that Still Alive is such an important book is its insistence that the full texture of women's existence in the Holocaust be acknowledged." Ruth Kluger's story of her years in several concentration camps, and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Still Alive is a memoir of the pursuit of selfhood against all odds, a fiercely bittersweet coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must learn never to rely on comforting assumptions, but always to seek her own truth. "A deeply moving and significant work . . . compared by European critics to the work of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel." -- Publishers Weekly "A stunning contemplation of human relationships, power and the creation of history. . . . A work of such nuance, intelligence and force that it leaps the bounds of genre." -- Kirkus Reviews Ruth Kluger is professor emerita of German at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of five books about German literature and the recipient of Austria's National Prize for Literary Criticism. Her widely translated memoir has won eight European Literary awards. Lore Segal's writings include the novels Other People's Houses and Her First American.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 One of the outstanding Holocaust memoirs of recent years April 6, 2002
Frederic and Sally Tubach, authors of "An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust" (northern California, USA)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
While Ruth Kluger's life trajectory shares certain features with other survivor stories, the way in which she narrates it-with deep intelligence, unblinking honesty and searing incisiveness, as well as the poet's facility for metaphor-puts STILL ALIVE apart. Her account avoids sentimentality and cliches; it eschews escapism and sanitizing as it unabashedly mines the depths of experience in extremis and brings to the surface a myriad of difficult truths. Attempting to please no one, Kluger's courageous voice demands uncommon rigor of her reader as she debunks a number of myths-of roots, for example, ("...running away was the best thing I ever did...."); the myth of the moral superiority of survivors and the hope that some good must have come from the camps, ("Auschwitz was no instructional institution....You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance"); the patriarchal myth and "old prejudice" that men will protect their women (whereas in reality the weakest were most exposed and often died abandoned and in misery). She dares heartbreaking speculations about her father's death and suggests that a "pornography of death" functioned in the camps.
Kluger is equally at home with the adult's capacity to analyze and the child's unerring eye for injustices, betrayals and humiliations as well as the inextinguishable nature of human desire. The story of her paranoid mother, who refused to release her to the safety of a Kindertransport, who as often as not gave unreliable guidance that nevertheless saved their lives at a crucial moment-the examination of this lifelong relationship becomes an exquisite and excruciating portrait of human connectedness in all its perplexities.
While the reader is compelled to agree with Kluger's insight that nothing good came of the concentration camps, and while one would wish for her a different past, STILL ALIVE is an unparalleled achievement that flies in the face of the murderers of Nazi Germany and of all brokers of hatred. One can only hope that her belief-that aside from love, reason constitutes the greatest good-is embraced by readers everywhere.
A Unique Holocaust Survivor Story January 22, 2002
Gladys A. Spratt (North Myrtle Beach,, SC United States)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
Although Ruth Gruber was but a young child in Vienna, Austria when the Nazis imposed their anti-Semitic laws, she remembers this childhood vividly. The uniqueness of the narrative results from her frankness in revealing her mother's emotional problems, which at first kept Ruth from avoiding the concentration camps by getting on a Kinder Transport, but in the end saved them both from death in Auschwitz. We had to wait until now to read this account because in order to protect her mother's feelings, Dr. Gruber refrained from publishing it in English until after her mother died. He mother lived to be ninety-seven years old.
Amazing January 2, 2006
hydrophilic (San Francisco, CA USA)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
There are many excellent memoirs describing the Nazi death camps, but this one touched me in a way that no other book has.
My fiance died in the World Trade Center, and this is really the only book that resonates with the deep, bitter grief I felt in that disaster's aftermath. I don't mean to compare 9/11 to the Shoah at all, but Kluger articulates many of the contradictory feelings and beliefs I myself have struggled with, including my frustration at being shaped by something that everyone knows about, but almost no one understands. I felt a shock of recognition when she complained about people visiting Auschwitz as a sentimental gesture, because I feel that same (totally irrational) discomfort about people visiting "Ground Zero". Though I have lived my life as an intellectual, Kluger spoke to the savage in me that still rails and howls at my loss.
This is oftentimes an angry, bitter book, but she mentions in passing that she has grandchildren, so I believe she found some measure of joy in her life after her internment. After my tragedy, I was forced to ask myself how someone who doesn't believe in life after death can go on in the face of the gruesome injustice of existence. I never really found an answer, but I kept on living, and I don't intend to stop anytime soon. I heard a lot of my journey in Kluger's voice as well, and I am exceedingly grateful that she wrote this book.
Witness to Goodness February 4, 2002
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
Thank you Ruth Kluger for Still Alive, an extraordinary book about an extraordinary childhood that is told simply and candidly. The author describes the unspeakable - a childhood lived "unprotected by any civilized law" - in clear and logical prose. She chooses to be a "witness to goodness." She chooses to write about a mother, who was a nurse, with a critical clarity as well as a critical love that gives room for her mother's unique nature. This is a must read.
A thoughtful and moving narrative May 17, 2002
idamo (Willow, AK)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
In Still Alive, Ruth Kluger while avoiding sentimentality in her words is able to evoke strong feelings from her readers with her thoughtful analysis of her experiences in pre-war Vienna, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Christianstadt. She also includes commentary on her experiences in dealing with those who had not been through the horrors of the Holocaust and concentration camps and sought to understand.I have been reading personnal narratives of Holocaust survivors for a research paper, and this work was by far the most memorable and original of the recent works I have read. Her languages is precise. She has thought her ideas through carefully and is aware of her own contradictions in some places. This book has the ability to alter a reader's perspective on what it was like to survive the Holocaust and deal with the memories of the experience.
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