Joe's War

Publishers Weekly

Raising his family in Britain during the Cold War, Joe Kobak was frequently in ill temper and given to oppressive silences. As she reached late middle age, his daughter, Annette, found she needed to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding him-the result is this unusual, and unusually personal, account of WWII. The story belongs equally to father and daughter, as the author forges a new intimacy with Joe and receives an accelerated dose of recent European history. A Czech living in Poland when hostilities began, Joe was a bright young man with a technical cast of mind and a tenacious memory. During the war, he smuggled people out of Poland, was strafed by German fighters during the fall of France, and relayed intercepted German radio transmissions to British code breakers. Kobak (biographer of Isabelle Eberhardt) uses her investigations into these experiences as an occasion to document one of the many tragedies of WWII-the prewar and wartime betrayal of the smaller Eastern European countries by France and Great Britain. Along the way we learn of the heroes of prewar Czechoslovakia, Masaryk and Benes, and of the deep enmity between Poland and the Ukraine. Kobak interpolates a diplomatic history of the 1930s and early 1940s with her father's adventures in Eastern Europe and her own as she retraced some of Joe's wartime travels in 2001. Part memoir, part Joe's first-person narrative, part historical account, the book violates genre boundaries-but it is precisely this lack of affectedness, couched in graceful, perceptive writing, that makes it such an engrossing and informative work. 20 photos, 2 maps. (Mar. 16) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

London-based Kobak (Isabelle: The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt) always wondered why her father had been such a silent, gruff, and suspicious man. After a divorce and other personal problems, she decided to research his life in the hopes that it would provide direction for her own. What she discovered can be boiled down to this: as a young man, her father fled to Poland from Czechoslovakia when Hitler marched in, escaped to France after Stalin's arrival, was evacuated to Britain when France fell, and then served in an Allied radio intelligence unit monitoring Russian communications. One-third of the book alternates between narrations by Kobak's father and Kobak herself. Then it switches to long sections on the Munich crisis, General Sikorski, and Soviet international relations and espionage activities, which, while meant to provide historical context, unfortunately break up the more compelling biographical portions. This reviewer wished for more details about ordinary life from the father (whom Kobak interviewed at length) or other sources. Still, this is an interesting story about one lucky person surviving a hellish time. For academic and large public libraries.-Daniel K. Blewett, Coll. of DuPage Lib., Glen Ellyn, IL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A daughter explores her Czechoslovakian father's traumatic experiences before, during, and after WWII-and along the way retells much of the 20th-century history of Poland. London-based writer Kobak (Isabelle: The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt, 1989) wanted, she says, "to try to make some sense of my father's silences." She wondered why her father didn't talk much-and why he slept with a hammer under his pillow. (Now in his 80s, he lives in Australia.) The author sketches the history of her mother and father, who met while playing Ping-Pong during the war in London, where he had fled to as the Nazis swept across continental Europe. He served for a time in Polish units that fought for the Allies. The author confesses to some personal problems (a divorce), and in 1989 she begins a long series of taped interviews with her father, hoping that by reconstructing his story she will add some stability to her own. For about one-third of her account, she moves back and forth from her father's narration (she quotes him at length and does not supply the definite articles his speech lacks) to her own stories about following quite literally in his footsteps. In the strongest, most harrowing portion, Kobak tells how in 2001 she and a friend traveled by train and by foot from Lviv (Ukraine) to Baligrod (in the Carpathian Mountains), the same journey her father had taken in far more dangerous circumstances in 1939. Kobak and her companion (neither spoke any of the relevant languages) trekked across frightening, devastated terrain, fearing wildlife, humans, and the unknown. But then she made an unfortunate decision: to abandon the dual-memoir and write a lengthy, fairly traditional history, complete with longblock quotations from published authorities. Her appealing voice, for a time, disappears. Until she and her father return to center stage near the end, her tale sags with unnecessary weight. What could have been a first-rate shorter work is instead a second-rate longer one. (20 b&w photos; 2 maps, not seen) Agency: Gillon Aitken