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: 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: I've met the author!
Review: I remember reading about this real-life story a number of years before this book was actually published; I still have the clipped article from the Boston Globe in one of my scrapbooks. Then, when I was a student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mr. Pogany came to our Hillel one Friday night and after services and dinner read from his book and spoke to us about the story behind it. Having met the author makes reading a book even better!

I've very interested in what befell Hungarian Jewry during WWII, possibly because it's so painful and haunting to realise that they were the last nation to be invaded by the Nazis, the final Jewish community in Europe still pretty much fully intact, but for the men who had been drafted into labour battalions or sent off to work camps several years earlier. It's an even more interesting and unique story because the family became Catholics shortly after WWI ended, and they were very devout, so much so that the author's uncle Gyuri eventually became a priest, and his father, Miklós, had seriously contemplated becoming one too. Because of a painful health condition, Gyuri got permission to recover his health in Italy, which was a stroke of luck, since he got out before things really began getting worse and worse, even before the arrival of the Nazis. Though the twins' mother was deported and murdered, the rest of the family did not live in the small town she did, and because they were in Budapest did not suffer the fate of the other Hungarian Jews in smaller towns and cities, who were packed into ghettos and then deported. The Budapest Ghetto wasn't erected until very late in the War, and when Miklós and his wife Muci (also a distant cousin of his) were finally deported, they were "only" taken to Bergen-Belsen as opposed to one of the death camps in Poland like the majority of their Hungarian co-religionists had been.

Because he was tucked away safely in Italy, a place which only lost about 19% of its prewar Jewish population, in the care of the holy mystic Padre Pio, Gyuri was not subject to anything like his twin brother and the rest of their family were. He could never understand why his beloved twin had lost faith in Catholicism and Christianity, how he could go back to Judaism, the religion they'd left as small boys and had never even really been very much of a part of in their early years before they all converted. Many people both then and now have made apologies for the collaboration, either active or through silent complicity, of ordinary citizens in allowing the Shoah to take place, much like Gyuri did, but Miklós and Muci had seen firsthand what had happened to them. Despite nearly thirty years of being a good Catholic, he was not protected from even the "good" labour brigade for converts. In the eyes of the Nazis and ordinary Hungarians, his family were still Jewish. The local parish priest arranged for their mother Gabriella to be taken from the ghetto to his church every day to hear Mass before she was deported, but he still didn't try to hide her or protect her from deportation. This book explores the complex relationship between not only the brothers who were separated by faith but also how the Church failed to protect its members, all members, and to speak out against what was going on, and how something of such a large scale could never have happened without the kind of hatred and collaboration from the common folk that the Poganies saw breaking through the surface after the Nazis and Hungarian fascists came to power.

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.

Rating:
Summary: Insightful, very well written family portrait
Review: This book is riveting in a way that a novel never could be. We follow a real family's struggle to survive the appalling hostilities and unspeakable tragedies to which Hungary's Jewish citizens were subjected in the years prior to and during World War II. Pogany's unique work is a sensitive and insightful portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times. It is also a moving account of a child's desire to understand the people and events that shaped the lives of his grandparents, his parents, his uncle, his brother and sister and himself.

Conversion to Catholicism was chosen by some Jewish people as a means to circumvent their surrounding atrocities. (This ultimately proved otherwise and Jews who converted were treated as brutally as those who did not.) Pogany's father and uncle (identical twins) followed their parents' route to the Catholic church, with one brother becoming a priest and the other eventually rediscovering his Jewish roots. The psychological interplay of these identical twins is marvelously revealed. The striking similarities, amazing differences and social connection of these twins will captivate and challenge everyone. Their life histories cannot help but deepen our fascination with how we come to be who we are.

Rating:
Summary: A Powerful, Beautifully Written Book
Review: While probably every survivor of the holocaust has a unique and compelling story to tell about the experience of the holocaust, the author of In My Brother's Image, who is the son of a survior, has written a fascinating account about the impact of the holocaust on the relationship between his father, and uncle, a Jew who became a priest.

From the outset of the book, I was connected with the characters on an emotional level, notwithstanding the fact that the book is not a work of fiction. The historical back drop of Jewish life in Hungary from the early 20th century through the holocaust was enlightening in many respects. While there is no shortage of books about the Jewish community in Germany and Jews in Poland prior to the World War II, this book captures the life of the Hungarian Jewish community in particular. Until I read this book, I had no idea about the significant number of Hungarian Jews who converted to Catholicism. The Jews of Berlin were not unlike the Jews of Budapest, highly assimilated. non-observant etc. The book is so powerful because it deals with so many emotional issues through the very real lives of the author's family: the silence of the Catholic church in Hungary during the holocaust, the relationship between the Jews who converted to Catholicism and their fellow Jews, the "lesson" from the holocaust that it is impossible for a Jew to take on another religion or identity,no matter what efforts a Jew may take to do so, how can one believe in God after experiencing the holocaust etc.

There is a personal and human element to this book that sets it apart. It is a literary "docudrama," if you will, that I could not put down reading; I found it to be compelling on so many different levels.