#7 - Liana Millu's Smoke Over Birkenau
I cannot believe I did not know until last month of this brilliant translation (in 1991) by the novelist and short-story writer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, of Millu's six essays on her experiences in Birkenau. You will cry, and you will be amazed at her elegance, in these astonishing stories which tell of the women who lived and suffered alongside her during her months at Birkenau in 1944. They are stories "of violence and tragedy, but also of resistance, of dreaming in the middle of a nightmare, and of the endurance of the human spirit." Primo Levi says that it is "one of the most powerful European testimonies to come form the women's lager at Auschwitz-Birkenau."

Book Recommendation #6
Clive Sinclair, in his True Tales of the Wild West, claims that the hybrid work he has written could be called "creative realism," but he prefers the term "dodgy nonfiction." Either way, it is so much fun! Two Jewish cousins from Luton, England, Saltzman and Peppercorn, wander the west trying to write it up. Peppercorn is a photojournalist doing a piece on the Buffalo Roundup at Custer State Park in So Dakota, but that is just an excuse for trying to find his inner cowboy. Saltzman is an American Studies professor from the University of St Albans and his adventures are more startling and even more fun (if that is possible). Much of this "cannot put it down" book is packed with details about actors and movies and scenes in movies: did you know that Mrs Wyatt Earp was of German Jewish ancestry? The dime-novel cover says it all (as you will see when you are done) and this is a clever, funny, slanted take on America, pop culture and much much else.