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Overview
"In the summer of 1993 I began a self-imposed journey into the blurred space between memory, story, and reality when I rented a car from Warsaw Avis and drove to the village in Poland in which my mother had lived before immigrating to the United States." So begins Wayne Karlin's Rumors and Stones, the haunting narrative of a writer's journey into his family's past in the small Polish town of Kolno whose 2,000 Jewish inhabitants were machinegunned in ditches in 1941. Karlin explores the tension in the role of the storyteller as a witness and keeper but also as shaper; it is a journey in space that becomes a journey into the past and into the truth that can only be found in the imagination; it is a journey into Karlin's own origins as a veteran of the Vietnam war and as a writer compelled in his work to always come back to that conflict and the net of connections from it he feels like a "cicatrix just under the skin of the brain."
Synopsis
"In the summer of 1993 I began a self-imposed journey into the blurred space between memory, story, and reality when I rented a car from Warsaw Avis and drove to the village in Poland in which my mother had lived before immigrating to the United States." So begins Wayne Karlin's Rumors and Stones, the haunting narrative of a writer's journey into his family's past in the small Polish town of Kolno whose 2,000 Jewish inhabitants were machinegunned in ditches in 1941. Karlin explores the tension in the role of the storyteller as a witness and keeper but also as shaper; it is a journey in space that becomes a journey into the past and into the truth that can only be found in the imagination; it is a journey into Karlin's own origins as a veteran of the Vietnam war and as a writer compelled in his work to always come back to that conflict and the net of connections from it he feels like a "cicatrix just under the skin of the brain."
Publishers Weekly
In 1941, German troops occupying the Polish town of Kolno machine-gunned into ditches its remaining 2000 Jewish inhabitants. In this poignant narrative, Karlin, an American novelist and former helicopter gunner in Vietnam, reenacts his 1993 visit to Kolno, where his mother (who died in 1991) had lived prior to emigrating to the U.S. in her youth; his father, a boxer, died when he was five, leaving the family to struggle in Manhattan and White Plains, N.Y. For Karlin, the Germans' extermination of Kolno's Jewish community fused in his mind with the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which U.S. soldiers systematically raped, mutilated and machine-gunned into ditches 500 Vietnamese villagers. Novelistic flashbacks to the saga of Karlin's grandparents and their family in Poland and America are interwoven with history and sharp reportage as he visits the sites of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Treblinka extermination camp; in the camp, Jewish prisoners staged a revolt, killed guards, blew up the gas chambers and escaped to the forest. This is a haunting meditation on human courage and the erosion of morality by war. (Oct.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In 1941, German troops occupying the Polish town of Kolno machine-gunned into ditches its remaining 2000 Jewish inhabitants. In this poignant narrative, Karlin, an American novelist and former helicopter gunner in Vietnam, reenacts his 1993 visit to Kolno, where his mother (who died in 1991) had lived prior to emigrating to the U.S. in her youth; his father, a boxer, died when he was five, leaving the family to struggle in Manhattan and White Plains, N.Y. For Karlin, the Germans' extermination of Kolno's Jewish community fused in his mind with the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which U.S. soldiers systematically raped, mutilated and machine-gunned into ditches 500 Vietnamese villagers. Novelistic flashbacks to the saga of Karlin's grandparents and their family in Poland and America are interwoven with history and sharp reportage as he visits the sites of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Treblinka extermination camp; in the camp, Jewish prisoners staged a revolt, killed guards, blew up the gas chambers and escaped to the forest. This is a haunting meditation on human courage and the erosion of morality by war. (Oct.)Library Journal
Novelist and editor Karlin (The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers, LJ 11/15/95) takes a physical and spiritual journey to Kolno, Poland, where his ancestors lived before and during the Holocaust. Karlin re-creates his family's history and their suffering, describing the murder of the Jews by machine gun in Kolno in July 1941. As a Vietnam veteran, Karlin especially feels the horror of the Holocaust through the filter of his previous experience. He looks for answers as to why such events happened in the past, why similar events still happen, and how they affect people today. His book is unusual in relating personal history from Vietnam to family experience of the Holocaust, and his insights are keen and potentially helpful. Recommended for larger collections.Mary F. Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll. Lib., WheelingBooknews
Presents 20 lectures and 74 papers, a few in French, from the July 1995 symposium on the precise determination and prediction of the positions and movements of celestial bodies. Contains sections on theory and ephemerides of the planets and the moon, satellites, and asteroids; Earth and deformable celestial bodies; the calculus of perturbations; general relativity; ephemerides representation; solar system astrometry; and reference frames in stellar astrometry. Topics include chaos and the evolution of the solar system, the history of celestial mechanics, and methods such as sympletic mappings, elliptic functions, CCD observations, VLBI and radar observations, and numerical integration of ephemerides. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Kirkus Reviews
A deeply emotional, intellectual, and literary examination of the Holocaust, framed through one man's journey to a small Polish town in which 2,000 Jews were executed by the Germans in 1941.Novelist Karlin (Lost Armies, not reviewed, etc.) took "a self-imposed journey into the blurred space between memory, story and reality" in the summer of 1993. The occasion was Karlin's visit to Kolno, a Polish town where his mother had lived before emigrating to this country—and the later scene of what Karlin aptly describes as "a small, almost casual `action,' a tiny thread in the tapestry of murder." Karlin uses this journey as a literary jumping-off point to chronicle his mother's life and times, his own experience as a Marine in Vietnam, and his postwar emotional upheavals. Jumping back and forth in time, Karlin also weaves into this narrative a meditation on the literature of the Vietnam War as it's been practiced by veterans of that conflict—both American and Vietnamese—and an examination of the American massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. The "rumors" of the title refers to Karlin's mother's family stories, which, he says, "grew from the real world" but also "were like dreams or rumors, their codes locked in her own references and memories, more riddles than guides." Karlin retells those stories and then fashions them into dreamlike fictional tales that he inserts among the book's more orderly and essaylike narrative chapters. There are several references to "stones," including those customarily placed atop gravestones by Jews and the ground-up gravestones used by the Germans to pave the roads at the Treblinka death camp. The literary "rumors" chapters are sometimes slightly disconcerting, but they are as powerfully evoked and as emotionally penetrating as are the reportorial sections.
A deft melding of disparate narratives, forming a unique and valuable addition to the literature of the Holocaust.