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h E a D E R b o o k S


Even thoughGoldberg is amaster of


ambience, I found her characters, their motives and life stories somehowincoherent, hanging up in the air. The individual elements of the story seemed tomake sense but failed to fit into a convincingwhole. Twenty-year-oldNora, for example, bursts into fits of anger that seemchildish and unjustified.Are these expressions of her emotional upheaval or signs of impending


mental breakdown? Throughout,Arin gives the impression of having fond feelings for Nora, butwhen it turns out that he has a lover,we never find outwhat he actually felt towardsNora orwhy he befriended her. Too many things are left unexplained, toomany emotions suppressed; there is toomuch mystery in the characters’motives. Is it a coming-of-age story? Partly,


perhaps – although I don’t see howNora is onE man’S WaR


aCCiDenT of faTe a PersonaLaCCounT 1938- 1945 imRé RochlitZ William laurier Press, 2011, pb, 210pp, £24


Reviewed by vesna Domany hardy


About ten years ago filmmaker Joseph Rochlitz, togetherwith his father Imré, presented a documentary film, The Righteous Enemy, in St John’sWood, London. It told howItalian fascist officials and diplomats in countries under Italian occupation helped to save 40,000 Jews fromdeportation, in spite of orders to the contrary, and included Joseph’s interviewswith survivors in Israel, South of France, Bulgaria,Greece and Croatia, aswell aswith surviving officials in Italy. It incorporated the story of Imré Rochlitz’s ownwar, a story he nowtells in more detail, in cooperationwith his son, in thismemoir, Accident of Fate. Although written fromamuch later


vantage point, Rochlitz’smemory is fresh and acute, and while his account benefits fromknowledge acquired later, it is primarily the view of a young person living through themost difficult period of European history. Growing up inVienna between the two


wars, likemany Central European Jews he faced conflicting loyalties as a Hungarian- born, German-speaking, fatherless Jewish boy. Barely 15, advised by hismother and uncles, Rochlitz escaped to still free Yugoslavia, where he found shelter with an uncle and aunt in Zagreb. He spent three years without documents, closeted in the apartment, terriblymissing school and the company of his peers. In 1941, when theAxis powers invaded


and then dismemberedYugoslavia, the occupying forces installed a quisling government, the nationalist Ustasha, in Zagreb.Ahorrific rule of plunder and murder began of Serbs, Gypsies, homosexuals,Masons, Jews and communists as well as of Croats who dared


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anymoremature at the end of the novel than shewas at the beginning. Is it a critique of middle-class Jewish society?Certainly – and a searing one at that. Is it the author’s personal wrestlewith ghosts of her past?Although I don’t knowmuch aboutGoldberg’s life, to me this seems very probable. All in all, And this is the Light is a


rich, heavy and unsettling book about unsettled people.


imré Rochlitz as a Partisan, and with the the staff of the animal hospital in the village of kordunsko Zagorje, late 1944. (sitting, first row, second fromthe right)


to resist. Soon Rochlitz was arrested and sent to the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp where large-scale executions were the order of the day, along with forced labour in inhumane conditions. Rochlitz’s honest analysis, with the benefit of time, of how the humanmind works in an extreme situation, of how it is possible to sleep when the person in the next bed is dying, of how the humanmind gets brutalised, is an important part of the book. Amazingly, he and his uncle are saved


fromsure death through the intervention of a German general and escape to Italian- occupied Dalmatia. The Italians weremore tolerant of the Jews, even though the pressure by the Germans was constant. Though now forced to concentrate their Jewish population in camps in the Northern Adriatic, they still refused to deport them. In comparison to Jasenovac, life in these camps seemed a holiday.After the capitulation of Italy and the liberation of the camps in September 1943, along with other prisoners, Rochlitz joined Tito’s partisans. Then comes a revealing description of the partisans’daily life in an inhospitable


and poor part of Croatia. For any young person, to see injustices committedmakes an indelible impression but I feel that Rochlitz underestimated the odds ranged against a ragged group of dispossessed, persecuted and traumatised people whomthe Communist leadership had to transforminto a disciplined army.While it is impossible to justify summary execution of prisoners, looters, suspected traitors, sexual abusers, and even ideological opponents, I feel Rochlitz is unjustified in equalising their popular resistance, for a long time the only resistance in fascist-occupied Europe, with the activities of the quisling Chetniks in the pay of Germans or Italians. This is the only weakness in an


otherwise well-written and humanememoir which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the history of Europe. The book is well illustrated with personal photos and documents and well-drawnmaps.


vesna Domany hardy was born in Zagreb in 1941 and spent theWar years as a hidden child. her father wasmurdered by the Ustasha and her mother joined the partisans.


JEWiSh REnaiSSancE octobER 2011


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