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This book, by definition, is a book to be read. The reading of it creates a particular demand on the reader, a demand that cannot necessarily be met. The book takes us back in time into the fragments of childhood memories that the adult author had held in his mind, and that he has shaped and woven into consciousness. His narrative begins with the terror of his family's physical disintegration and the death of what we take to be his father, when he was a very young child. The story develops with the reader's dawning awareness that these episodes of childhood have been spent within concentration camps. The author has survived fearful experiences and been liberated from the camps and has eventually been adopted by a family who denies his past. The denial is total. There is no space made for the working through of the trauma of his previous existence so he struggles to discover the truth of his past and the history that shaped it.
There is specificity about his past, as we would expect. It is his story, and history. It has integrity, and we the readers are asked to believe it. It has an honesty which transcends judgement and criticism. This seems to be because he says the unsayable and leaves the reader with the unthinkable. There is no analysis here and no judgement. These are the truths of the human heart. They have to be truths because our imagination falls short of the reality of the moral disorder that he offers us. In the