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Schindler's List (Paperback)
by Thomas Keneally
| Category:
Biography, Fiction, Inspiration, Humanity |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Gripping, brilliant, and exceptional, Schindler's List is a timeless story about the triumph of humanity. |
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Author: Thomas Keneally
Publisher: Touchstone; Touchstone Ed edition
Pub. in: December, 1993
ISBN: 0671880314
Pages: 400
Measurements: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00599
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- Awards & Credential -
The acclaimed #1 bestseller, winner of the Booker Prize, now a film by Steven Spielberg. |
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Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize-winning, fictionalized biography of Oskar Schindler memorializes a member of the Nazi party who endangered his own life for four years, working privately to save Jews from the death camps. A playboy who loved fine wines and foods, he was also a smooth-talking manipulator (and briber) of Nazi officials, as well as a clever entrepreneur, already on his way to stunning financial success by the early days of World War II. Nowhere in Schindler's background are there any hints that he would one day become the savior of eleven hundred Jewish men and women.
While the excellent film of this novel concentrates on the dangers Schindler and "his Jews" faced daily throughout the war, Keneally, well known for his depictions of characters acting under stress, concentrates on the character of Oskar Schindler himself, beginning with his childhood and teen years. As he explores Schindler's transformation from war profiteer and "passive" Nazi to a man willing to use his fortune to ensure the salvation of his factory workers, Keneally reveals a man of enormous courage and derring-do, a man who thrives by living on the edge.
Presenting episodes from the lives of some of the "Schindlerjuden," Keneally highlights their humanity, creating moments of high drama. Characters such as Leopold Pfefferberg and factory manager Itzhak Stern move in and out of the narrative, illustrating graphically the extent to which their lives depend upon Oskar Schindler, while the constant intrusion of sadistic SS commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler's life shows the fragility of their security. Other stories, of people who just missed being saved by Schindler, highlight the arbitrariness of fate – chance - in their (and our) lives.
Throughout the novel, Keneally stresses the importance of bearing witness and testifying to the atrocities. In one of the novel's most moving passages, Schindler and his lover ride horses to a ridge where they can view the expulsion of the Jews from the Krakow ghetto, watching, horrified, as old or crippled laggards are murdered in front of Jewish children. "They permitted witnesses because they believed the witnesses, all, would perish, too." Later, Schindler works with a Zionist rescue organization, secretly going to Budapest to testify about the hidden death camps.
Schindler's heroism, his goodness within a country committed to the extermination of other humans, his recognition that witnesses are essential, and his ability to use the system in order to hasten its end bring this story of one man's fight against the Holocaust to life. But it is Keneally's incorporation of Schindler's faults and excesses which gives texture and depth to this portrait and make Schindler a character with whom the reader can identify. Keneally's meticulous research and his portrait of Schindler after the war, beloved by Jews but at loose ends personally and professionally, make this novel an unforgettable study of character and time. (From quoting Mary Whipple, USA)
Target readers:
General readers
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Thomas Keneally was born in 1936 and raised in the rugged expanse of Australia. As a young man, he planned to join the priesthood, but by 1960, on the verge of the Vietnam War, Keneally found the church in such moral turmoil that he decided it was impossible to go through with his ordination. Keneally received his formal education in Sydney, Australia.
Over the past 30 years, he has published over 25 novels, more than a dozen screenplays, and several works of non-fiction. These works include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, The Playmaker, Season in Purgatory, A Family Madness, and Woman of the Inner Sea. His work has been nominated four times for the Booker Prize, which he won in 1982 for Schindler's List. He won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, The Miles Franklin Award, The Critics Circle Award, and a Logie (Australian Emmy).
A self-described "literary biker," Keneally has traveled through Australia, Iceland, Antarctica, America, Eastern Europe, roaming across genres and topics, often championing the underdog. "I'm a writer who's always been hard to pin down," Keneally says, "because I've sometimes written about things that are none of my concern - like the American South or Antarctica or Australian aboriginals or the Holocaust. I think I appeal to 'hells angels' kind of writers.” Keneally has modeled many of his characters after the traditional Australian hero – the "battler." "In America everyone admires successful men and women. In Australia, they suspect them. The Australian hero is the person to whom everything has happened - drought, fire, flood." Keneally lives in California where he teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of California, Irvine, where he holds a Distinguished Professorship.
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From the Publisher:
Winner of the Booker Prize and Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction
Schindler's List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers.
Working with the actual testimony of Schindler's Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.
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From Chapter One
General Sigmund List's 5 armored divisions, driving north from the Sudetenland, had taken the sweet south Polish jewel of Cracow from both flanks on September 6, 1939. And it was in their wake that Oskar Schindler entered the city which, for the next five years, would be his oyster. Though within the month he would show that he was disaffected from National Socialism, he could still see that Cracow, with its railroad junction and its as yet modest industries, would be a boomtown of the new regime. He wasn't going to be a salesman anymore. Now he was going to be a tycoon.
It is not immediately easy to find in Oskar's family's history the origins of his impulse toward rescue. He was born on April 28, 1908, into the Austrian Empire of Franz Josef, into the hilly Moravian province of that ancient Austrian realm. His hometown was the industrial city of Zwittau, to which some commercial opening had brought the Schindler ancestors from Vienna at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Herr Hans Schindler, Oskar's father, approved of the imperial arrangement, considered himself culturally an Austrian, and spoke German at the table, on the telephone, in business, in moments of tenderness. Yet when in 1918 Herr Schindler and the members of his family found themselves citizens of the Czechoslovak republic of Masaryk and Benes, it did not seem to cause any fundamental distress to the father, and even less still to his ten-year-old son. The child Hitler, according to the man Hitler, was tormented even as a boy by the gulf between the mystical unity of Austria and Germany and their political separation. No such neurosis of disinheritance soured Oskar Schindler's childhood. Czechoslovakia was such a bosky, unravished little dumpling of a republic that the German-speakers took their minority stature with some grace, even if the Depression and some minor governmental follies would later put a certain strain on the relationship.
Zwittau, Oskar's hometown, was a small, coal-dusted city in the southern reaches of the mountain range known as the Jeseniks. Its surrounding hills stood partly ravaged by industry and partly forested with larch and spruce and fir. Because of its community of German-speaking Sudetendeutschen, it maintained a German grammar school, which Oskar attended. There he took the Real-gymnasium Course which was meant to produce engineers - mining, mechanical, civil - to suit the area's industrial landscape. Herr Schindler himself owned a farm-machinery plant, and Oskar's education was a preparation for this inheritance.
The family Schindler was Catholic. So too was the family of young Amon Goeth, by this time also completing the Science Course and sitting for the Matura examinations in Vienna.
Oskar's mother, Louisa, practiced her faith with energy, her clothes redolent all Sunday of the incense burned in clouds at High Mass in the Church of St. Maurice. Hans Schindler was the sort of husband who drives a woman to religion. He liked cognac; he liked coffeehouses. A redolence of brandy-warm breath, good tobacco, and confirmed earthiness came from the direction of that good monarchist, Mr. Hans Schindler.
The family lived in a modern villa, set in its own gardens, across the city from the industrial section. There were two children, Oskar and his sister, Elfriede. But there are not witnesses left to the dynamics of that household, except in the most general terms. We know, for example, that it distressed Frau Schindler that her son, like his father, was a negligent Catholic.
But it cannot have been too bitter a household. From the little that Oskar would say of his childhood, there was no darkness there. Sunlight shines among the fir trees in the garden. There are ripe plums in the corner of those early summers. If he spends a part of some June morning at Mass, he does not bring back to the villa much of a sense of sin. He runs his father's car out into the sun in front of the garage and begins tinkering inside its motor. Or else he sits on a side step of the house, filing away at the carburetor of the motorcycle he is building.
Oskar had a few middle-class Jewish friends, whose parents also sent them to the German grammar school. These children were not village Ashkenazim - quirky, Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox - but multilingual and not-so-ritual sons of Jewish businessmen. Across the Hana Plain and in the Beskidy Hills, Sigmund Freud had been born of just such a Jewish family, and that not so long before Hans Schindler himself was born to solid German stock in Zwittau.
Oskar's later history seems to call out for some set piece in his childhood. The young Oskar should defend some bullied Jewish boy on the way home from school. It is a safe bet it didn't happen, and we are happier not knowing, since the event would seem too pat. Besides, one Jewish child saved from a bloody nose proves nothing. For Himmler himself would complain, in a speech to one of his Einsatzgruppen, that every German had a Jewish friend. " 'The Jewish people are'going to be annihilated,' says every Party member. 'Sure, it's in our program: elimination of the Jews, annihilation - we'll take care of it.' And then they all come trudging, eighty million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew. Sure, the others are swine, but this one is an A-One Jew."
Trying still to find, in the shadow of Himmler, some hint of Oskar's later enthusiasms, we encounter the Schindlers' next-door neighbor, a liberal rabbi named Dr. Felix Kantor. Rabbi Kantor was a disciple of Abraham Geiger, the German liberalizer of Judaism who claimed that it was no crime, in fact was praiseworthy, to be a German as well as a Jew. Rabbi Kantor was no rigid village scholar. He dressed in the modern mode and spoke German in the house. He called his place of worship a "temple" and not by that older name, "synagogue." His temple was attended by Jewish doctors, engineers, and proprietors of textile mills in Zwittau. When they traveled, they told other businessmen, "Our rabbi is Dr. Kantor - he writes articles not only for the Jewish journals in Prague and Brno, but for the dailies as well."
Rabbi Kantor's two sons went to the same school as the son of his German neighbor Schindler. Both boys were bright enough eventually, perhaps, to become two of the rare Jewish professors at the German University of Prague. These crew-cut German speaking prodigies raced in knee pants around the summer gardens. Chasing the Schindler children and being chased. And Kantor, watching them flash in and out among the yew hedges, might have thought it was all working as Geiger and Graetz and Lazarus and all those other nineteenth-century German-Jewish liberals had predicted. We lead enlightened lives, we are greeted by German neighbors - Mr. Schindler will even make snide remarks about Czech statesmen in our hearing. We are secular scholars as well as sensible interpreters of the Talmud. We belong both to the twentieth century and to an ancient tribal race. We are neither offensive nor offended against.
Later, in the mid-1930s, the rabbi would revise this happy estimation and make up his mind in the end that his sons could never buy off the National Socialists with a German-language Ph.D. - that there was no outcrop of twentieth-century technology or secular scholarship behind which a Jew could find sanctuary, any more than there could ever be a species of rabbi acceptable to the new German legislators. In 1936 all the Kantors moved to Belgium. The Schindlers never heard of them again.
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Alex Diaz (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-04 00:00>
Schindler's List, Thomas Keneally's 1982 non-fiction "novel" about Oskar Schindler's transformation from a hedonistic bon vivant German (actually, Sudeten German, born in what is now part of the Czech Republic) war profiteer to savior of over 1,000 Jews during World War II, is one of the most fascinating accounts about the darkest chapter of that global conflict, the Holocaust. It vividly portrays the horrors of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish inhabitants in German-occupied Europe while at the same time proving that one person, no matter how flawed and contradictory in nature he or she is, can rise to the occasion and make a difference.
In his Author's Note, Keneally explains that he uses the oft-used technique of telling a true story in the format of a fictional account, partly because he is primarily a novelist (Confederates, Gossip From the Forest) and "because the novel's techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar." He also acknowledges the persistence of Leopold Pfefferberg, a Los Angeles leather-goods store owner and one of the "Schindlerjuden" - the handful of mostly Polish Jews saved by Schindler from the SS by Oskar's use of his charm, connections with high Nazi Party officials, and ultimately, the fortune Schindler had gone to make in Krakow after Poland's surrender in the fall of 1939.
Like Steven Spielberg's 1993 Academy Award-winning film it inspired, Schindler's List (published in Europe as Schindler's Ark) describes how Schindler takes over a factory - formerly owned by Jewish investors - and makes a fortune selling, among other things, pots and pans to the German Army. But as the war goes on and Schindler sees first-hand the horrible crimes the Third Reich is committing in the name of the "Final Solution," the well-connected charmer and ladies' man becomes more concerned about saving lives than making money. First, he has a few fortunate Jews listed with the SS as "essential war-industry workers" in his Krakow factory; later, when he discovers that SS Commandant Amon Goeth has been given orders to dispose of every inmate and slave laborer at the Plaszow Labor Camp before the advancing Soviets reach Krakow, he spends all of his wealth paying Goeth and other corrupt SS officials for the lives of nearly 1,200 of the Jewish men, women, and children who form Schindler's workforce.
While Spielberg's movie faithfully captures the novel's account of the Holocaust years, Keneally's book gives the reader more details about Oskar's life before and after the war, including a short account of his prewar activities and his postwar business failures in Europe and Argentina. However, Keneally's focus is on Schindler's inspiring transformation from shameless and charming entrepreneur to "Righteous Person," proving that decency and righteousness can triumph over even the most implacable tyranny and hatred. |
Naomi (MSL quote), Japan
<2007-01-04 00:00>
Schindler's List, originally published as Schindler's Ark, is the true story of how Oskar Schindler, an aristocratic German industrialist, heavy drinker, briber, and womaniser, was transformed into a saviour during the horrors of World War II. His remarkable rescue of more than a thousand Jews is retold brilliantly in this honest and detailed account by Thomas Keneally.
The story is set in Poland, where Schindler struggled to protect his Jewish factory employees from the cruel and terrible claws of the extermination camps. Schindler's efforts in saving souls increased as the war worsened, and climaxed with Schindler's List, the book of life and ticket to freedom for many Jewish survivors, whose accounts are carefully retold in this book.
Although Keneally's long and descriptive sentences require patient concentration, and could become a stumbling block for some readers, once overcome, no reader could fail to be drawn into the action-packed plot. For Keneally summons terror and disgust with his gruesome profiles of the SS Gestapo, and draws smiles and smirks with his descriptions of Schindler's devious dealings with them.
In Keneally's book, metaphors and similes vividly contrast the characters and scenery, omitting no details, and succeed in taking the reader to a different time and place. Although a biography, and therefore brimming with names, dates, and numbers, Keneally manages to navigate history so that no event is left without significance.
Schindler's List is a riveting read which no one should miss out on, as not only is it an exciting story, it also gives an accurate glance into the labour camps of World War II, and takes a look at the darker side of humanity. A Booker Prize-winning novel, now also an Oscar-winning movie, Schindler's List is a must for anyone over 15. |
Tom (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-04 00:00>
Thomas Keneally's account of the life of Oscar Schindler is an outstanding book and probably one of the best Booker winners. In many ways, it is better than the movie. I read the book after seeing the movie and was more impressed by the book as it covers the life of the person better. Most people do not understand how the book traverses the life of the person right from childhood to old age and shows his gradual change. While the movie largely covers the brutality, the book does a superb job of both the brutality and the person. The lives of some of the people were covered in greater detail and stylistically, this book was superb in its flow and account of the history of the Sudeten Germans and the gradual changes that affected all the people around them. Most importantly, Oscar Schindler is treated in great detail, including his relationship with his mother and father, which is interesting as one sees that a lot of him comes from his father. He never had any racism, he was petty, unscrupulous and unfaithful to his wife. However, he was disgusted by the brutality of the local SS and tried to avoid them. His last days are also dealt with very well and is very sad as he was not treated well in Germany after the war (he was called a "Jew kisser") but was treated benevolently in Israel. It is interesting to note that people like Amon Goeth tried to get some of the Jews to give testimony that he was kind to them. The author has written many wonderful novels before this such as "Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith" and "Gossip from the Forest.” However, this book was a masterpiece and his doom, as every book after this was compared to this and found to fall short. Well, that is really too bad and I personally am sorry for the author. The movie was good too, but this book was much better. It probably will not be liked outside the literary circles (most people do not read these days anyway), but it holds a special place among the books written in the past 30 years. |
J. Lynch (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-04 00:00>
Schindler's List is an extremely well written novel. It truly grasps your attention and makes you feel as if you're part of the story. Adults may have an easier time reading this book rather than children younger then the age of twelve. What makes it so difficult to understand, are some of the gruesome details and the very straight forward way of writing. If you are interested in chronicles about war and history, and aren't bothered by some mind blowing facts, this is a very appealing book.
It is about Oscar Schindler, a heavy drinker that loves women, and cares mostly about himself. Not until he realizes how horrible the Jewish people are being treated in the concentration camps, is it when he takes action. Schindler was able to save over one thousand Jews. He saved them from having the same fate as millions of other Jews. This novel is one of the best I have read in along time. Though very heart-breaking and deppressing, it truly lets you see what it was like for the Jewish people in that area of time. |
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