August 19, 2013
"I think I can pinpoint exactly the hour and day when my childhood ended: Easter Sunday, April 13, 1941." In this ambitious mix of history and memoir, Goldstein, a Croatian writer, looks back at WWII and its effects on his life, family, and neighbors. Much of the book is dedicated to the last days of his father, a leftist bookseller who was arrested and later killed at the Jadovno concentration camp in Croatia. However, Goldstein covers a lot of territory as he explores the vicious ethnic warfare between Serbs and Croats from 1941 onward and looks at how the Nazi pogrom further affected his country's Jewish community. The result reads like several books in one, with Goldstein digressing through numerous tangents to provide a thorough accounting. Thus, readers learn about the fate of the family and its bookstore, the brutal tactics of the fascist Ustasha regime, and Goldstein's own activities as a partisan. It's a poignant, uncompromising recollection, told in a meandering but easy-to-follow manner. Though its size will intimidate many readers, Goldstein's book, reconstructed through personal experience as well as numerous interviews and historical documents ("I have placed all my memories under suspicion"), provides invaluable insight into Croatia during WWII.
Starred review from August 1, 2013
A chilling personal account of the deep-seated terror and ethnic violence underpinning the puppet state of Croatia during World War II. In a memoir that came to light thanks to the attention of Belgrade-born poet Charles Simic, who offers an elucidating introduction here, Croatian editor and historian Goldstein, born in 1928, not only recounts his intimate grief resulting from the murder of his father by the fascist Ustasha thugs that came to power with Croatia's "independence" in 1941, but he encapsulates the ongoing anguish of the multiethnic groups of the former Yugoslavia that are still convulsed by sectarian hatred. With the encouragement of Hitler--who suggested to the Ustasha chief that in order for Croatia to become a stable state, "it would have to carry out a policy of ethnic intolerance for fifty years"--the Ustasha regime was bent on "cleansing" the Croatian state of Serbs as well as Jews and Gypsies. Goldstein's father, a prosperous Jewish bookseller, had communist and intellectual connections, and thus several strikes against him in the views of the fascists, who first imprisoned him in the Danica concentration camp, then the formidable Jadovno death camp, before he was systematically executed. The author was barely 13 years old at the time, but he was shocked into adulthood quickly, especially as he witnessed the betrayal of former friends and colleagues. With his mother imprisoned and the author moved among different homes, Goldstein and the remaining family eventually joined the Croatian partisan fighters camped out in the forests. In this riveting narrative, the author often refers to the recent Croat-Serb ethnic violence in an attempt to explain how "modern Croatia has not been freed from this disease, and it is only in the last few years that it has begun to be treated for it." A stunning work that looks frankly at the "roots of evil."
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October 15, 2013
During WWII, a Nazi-backed regime ruled Croatia, with deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands. One of those was the father of Goldstein, who recounts his family's experiences during the horrific period. Goldstein, 13 when Germany installed the Ustasha regime in 1941, and his younger brother had a resourceful mother who sensed the imminence of roundups and arranged the eventual flight of the family to the refuge of the Communist Partisans. Goldstein's father, however, vanished into the regime's prison camps, a mystery Goldstein investigates amid a recollection of how his friends, schoolmates, and neighbors in his hometown, Karlovac, responded to the Ustasha regime and its persecutions of Jews and Serbs. Representing a range from fanatical nationalists to cynical opportunists, this gallery of Goldstein's acquaintances captures the atmosphere of genocide on a chillingly interpersonal scale. Meeting some such people decades later at a book trade convention, Goldstein matter-of-factly remarks on their avoidance of the truth of 1941's massacres in Croatia. Based on his personal story, Goldstein's brave reconstruction of the massacres and their successor atrocities in 1945 and the 1990s should be added to the Holocaust shelf.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)