Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem

#331
Title: Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem
Author: Solly Ganor
Year: 2003
Publisher: Kodansha America
Country: Lithuania
354 pages

If I've counted correctly, this is 100 for 2009.

Ganor's Holocaust narrative takes place primarily in villages and ghettos, providing a useful contrast to memoirs that primarily describe life in the camps. Ganor has some access to the outside world and at many points is able to comment on the relations between the Jewish captives and the communities within or near which their confinement takes place. Though most of the non-Jewish citizens in his account are not sympathetic, there are more than in many Holocaust narratives. Ganor frames his otherwise chronological and straightforward story with two meetings with the U.S. Nisei (2nd generation Japanese) soldier who rescued him. He also punctuates his own story with this soldier's. It's the first book I've read by a Jewish Holocaust survivor that names the existence of U.S. interment camps for citizens of Japanese ancestry or origin. I appreciated reading a Jewish narrative that also accounted for a Japanese-American soldier's, though from a purely literary perspective it wasn't as successful as it might have been.

Recently I've read a number of accounts of genocide in Asia, Africa, South America, and Oceania. In conjunction with Ganor, these remind me that we are all ready to dehumanize and kill each other with little provocation; the unique horrors of the Nazi approach are its scale and mechanized, sanitized nature.

Read with Gilbert Tuhabonye's This Voice in My Heart: A Runner's Memoir of Genocide, Faith, and Forgiveness to compare an African genocide to the European, and with Lauren Kessler's excellent Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family to learn more about interment and its effects on one Japanese-American family.