In My Brother's Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith After the Holocaust

Rating:
Summary: A compelling book indeed
Review: As the child of parents who came from the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of Hungary, and as one raised within that Orthodoxy, albeit transplanted to America, this book exposed me to a portion of Hungarian Jewish history I never really knew. This book speaks of the tragedy of so many Hungarian Jews. Jews who were totally estranged from their ancestral faith, who had no attachment to their heritage. For those people, Judaism was an undesirabe yoke to be cast aside or at best ignored. This book tells the reader however that one cannot truly escape his true identity. The true hero of the book, the author's father, discovers this in the hell of Bergen-Belsen. His uncle, the priest, spends the war in relative safety, but always in fear that he would be denounced. That uncle also has to contend with the very real possiblity that his Hungarian coreligionists "allowed" him to escape to Italy into the warm embrace of Padre Pio and the Capuchin monks not out of dedication to him in the spirit of Christian fellowship, but rather out of a desire to be rid of another Jew.
The emotions that pervade this book are powerful. The characters are real. The dialogue, while made up, displays the pathos of the characters and speaks to the reader's soul.
This book is about many things: religion, families and their dysfunctions, theodicy, Catholic-Jewish relations, and overding all of those, this book is about the complexity of life. Like all great works, the message of this book will be shaped by the reader and his/her weltanschaung.

Rating:
Summary: GOOD AS OPPOSED TO GREAT
Review: I hate to disagree with 3 5-star evaluations, but I thought the story was insightful and interesting but I did not find the reading process as easy as another critique stated. If the book was decrased by about 50 pages, I believe it would be even more compelling than it is.

I have read a number of holocaust books and this family did not have it as bad as others, but I assure you all of them were near death except the Catholic Father.

I particularly liked the beginning and end when the author was talking in the first person. A fine read.

Rating:
Summary: Quick read, hits on many themes with us today.
Review: I thought this was a good book and could not put it down. It explores the issues of assimilation among Budapest's Jews, conversion issues, Jewish and Catholic relations, Jesiwh security or lack thereof, Catholic complicity in the Holocaust and the Catholic church setting the stage for millenia that made the Holocaust possible. It also talks of family love and connectedness despite serious philosophical differences. We're discussing this in my book club and it should be very interesting.