…all too believable,
all too horrific…
A friendship corrupted by Nazi hatred before WWII—
two friends who couldn’t understand how to avoid mutual self-destruction.
Book review:
Address Unknown
by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor (1903-1996)
Washington Square Press, New York, copyright 1938, published 2001
Read Address Unknown in one sitting. You can do it.
This is a tiny work that delivers gut punches on every other page. Repeatedly, it seems to be gratuitously dramatic and somewhat contrived, except that it’s all too believable and all too horrific.
It’s hard to discuss Address Unknown without including spoiler information, but I’m going to try because I think you should want to take a short time out of your busy day to read this through at one sitting and let the experience overwhelm you.
In 1932-34, Max Eisenstein, a Jew in New York, corresponds with his non-Jewish friend, Martin Schulse, in Germany. They have a joint business interest: a New York art gallery. Ominously, Hitler is setting the stage to become Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
Max and Martin habitually exchange letters. Their correspondence is swiftly transformed from business matters and the chatter of friends, to awkwardly ingenuous, increasingly corrosive, and bitterly destructive words that betray Martin’s fatal embrace of the newly politicized Aryan culture.
Max and Martin cease to be friends. The terrible consequence of their estrangement is no surprise, but not less terrible because we can so easily grasp its nature and implications.
Kathrine Taylor relentlessly tells the story. The reader is left to wonder about the dreadful imperatives of the kind of human behavior that cannot avoid self-destruction.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
You’re down to just one piece of bread…
…would you share it with anybody?
Book review:
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
by Sebastian Junger
–
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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© 2019 – 2024, Richard Subber. All rights reserved.