Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

Nothing Makes You Free, prefaced by a wild-swinging, whip-smart, angry, and occasionally irreverent essay by editor Melvin Jules Bukiet, is an internationally flavored collection of prose, both fiction and non-fiction, by the descendants of survivors of the Holocaust. Bukiet contends, convincingly, that the event remains a "historic Rorschach blot"; a comet that hit at "six million miles per hour" whose waves are still spreading, and a "talismanic touchstone that every writer [Jewish or not] must genuflect toward." Contributors include Eva Hoffman, Thane Rosenbaum, Victoria Redel, Art Spiegelman, and Carl Friedman. The selections vary wildly in genre, tone, and quality, and are, as often as not, at emotional and esthetic odds with each other. But cumulatively, they successfully move the reader toward some answer to what Bukiet calls the book's "implicit question... how atrocity gets filtered through imagination." --H. O'Billovitch