Childhood

by Jona Oberski

Other authorsJim Shepard (Afterword), Ralph Manheim (Translator)

Paperback, 2014

Status

Available

Call number

839.3

Genres

Biography & Memoir

General Fiction

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Penguin Classics (2014), 112 pages

Description

A rediscovered masterpiece: an unblinking view of the Holocaust through a child's eyes. Told from the perspective of a child slowly awakening to the atrocities surrounding him, Childhood is a searing story of the Holocaust that no reader will soon forget. As five-year-old Jona waits with his mother and father to emigrate from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam to Palestine, they are awakened at night, put on a train, and eventually interned in the camps at Bergen-Belsen. There, what at first seems to be a merely dreary existence soon reveals itself to be one of the worst horrors humanity has ever created. A triumph of heartrending clarity and dispassionate amazement, Childhood stands tall alongside such monuments of Holocaust literature as The Diary of Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel's Night, and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member JosephCamilleri

The story recounted in Jona Oberski's novella is tragically familiar - during World War II, the life of a young Jewish couple and their 7-year old son is destroyed when they are taken from Amsterdam to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. What sets this book apart from other Holocaust stories

is the narrative voice, which is that of the little boy. The simplicity of the narration, brilliantly rendered in Ralph Manheim's translation, fuels the tragic irony of the text. It is very obvious that the boy is describing events which he does not understand at all, whilst we, as readers, share in the adults' horrible secret. The book's brevity adds to its effectiveness - were it any longer, it would have been too harrowing. Oberski is himself a Holocaust survivor which makes this read even more poignant.

This edition forms part of Pushkin Press' "Pushkin Collection"

3.5 *

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LibraryThing member edwinbcn

Kinderjaren is an autobiographical novel. It is a fictionalized account which closely follows reality, but some details, such as the age of the child, have been changed. This short novel describes the deportation of a Jewish family, the death of the father in a concentration camp, and eventually

their liberation during a transport at the end of the war. The work is written from the perspective of the child, almost all in the words of and at the level of comprehension of the child.

Kinderjaren has been translated into many languages. Jona Oberski, the author, recently (September 2022), forty-four years after Kinderjaren, published a new work.

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