Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

History is preserved in the memories of Holocaust survivors and the imaginations of their children, the so-called "Second Generation". This title considers the heritage of the descendants of those who faced the horrific lie that adorned the gates of Auschwitz: "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work makes you free"). Gathered here are writings both fictional and nonfictional, ranging from farce to fantasy to brutal realism, from an international selection of writers including Art Spiegelman, Eva Hoffman, Joseph Skibell and Carl Friedman.

Nothing Makes You Free, prefaced by a wild-swinging, whip-smart, angry, and occasionally irreverent essay by editor Melvin Jules Bukiet, is an internationally flavored collection of prose, both fiction and non-fiction, by the descendants of survivors of the Holocaust. Bukiet contends, convincingly, that the event remains a "historic Rorschach blot"; a comet that hit at "six million miles per hour" whose waves are still spreading, and a "talismanic touchstone that every writer [Jewish or not] must genuflect toward." Contributors include Eva Hoffman, Thane Rosenbaum, Victoria Redel, Art Spiegelman, and Carl Friedman. The selections vary wildly in genre, tone, and quality, and are, as often as not, at emotional and esthetic odds with each other. But cumulatively, they successfully move the reader toward some answer to what Bukiet calls the book's "implicit question... how atrocity gets filtered through imagination." --H. O'Billovitch