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Summary
Summary
Early on a grey November morning in 1941, only weeks after the German invasion, a small Ukrainian town is overrun by the SS. This new novel from the award-winning author of the Booker Prize short-listed The Dark Room tells of the three days that follow and the lives that are overturned in the process.
Penned in with his fellow Jews, under threat of deportation, Ephraim anxiously awaits word of his two sons, missing since daybreak.
Come in search of her lover, to fetch him home again, away from the invaders, Yasia must confront new and harsh truths about those closest to her.
Here to avoid a war he considers criminal, German engineer Otto Pohl is faced with an even greater crime unfolding behind the lines, and no one but himself to turn to.
And in the midst of it all is Yankel, a boy determined to survive this. But to do so, he must throw in his lot with strangers.
As their stories mesh, each of Rachel Seiffert's characters comes to know the compromises demanded by survival, the oppressive power of fear, and the possibility of courage in the face of terror.
Rich with a rare compassion and emotional depth, A Boy in Winter is a story of hope when all is lost and of mercy when the times have none.
Author Notes
Rachel Seiffert was born in England & now lives in Germany. This is her first novel.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Booklist Review
The SS occupies a Ukrainian town and rounds up all the Jews except for two brothers who manage to hide. Yasia, a farm girl, travels to the town in search of her fiancé, enlisted as a laborer for the Nazis. German engineer Otto struggles to build a road for the Reich he despises. These three story lines intertwine, illustrating how evil affects ordinary people. Seiffert's (The Walk Home, 2017) characterization is well-realized, with a Nazi Sturmbannführer (military officer) portrayed with more complexity than archetypal villainy. The novel truly shines in its offering of diverse, authentic perspectives. Some Ukrainians view the Germans as a better alternative to the oppressive Soviets, for they build infrastructure and allow farmers back on their land. While there is no open hatred, simmering resentment and fear form a better them than us attitude towards the fate of the Jewish inhabitants. Others possess a less faulty moral compass, yet one act of naïve compassion spawns foreseeable and terrible tragedy. Seiffert does provides more successful instances of kindness as well as hope in her accomplished literary work.--Latham, Bethany Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
UNBELIEVABLE: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History, by Katy Tur. (Dey St./William Morrow, $16.99.) During the 2016 presidential campaign, Tur, an NBC news correspondent, was a favorite target of Donald J. Trump. Her book was published almost a year after the election; now, updated with a new introduction, it's a useful testament as Trump's attacks on the press continue unabated. IMPROVEMENT, by Joan Silber. (Counterpoint, $16.95.) This novel of interconnected story lines centers on Reyna, a single mother drawn into a cigarettesmuggling scheme by her boyfriend, imprisoned at Rikers. The book expands to encompass 1970s Turkey, Reyna's aunt and antiquities smugglers. Our reviewer, Kamila Shamsie, called the novel one "of richness and wisdom and huge pleasure." GHOSTS OF THE INNOCENT MAN: A True Story of Trial and Redemption, by Benjamin Rachlin. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $17.99.) In 1980s North Carolina, Willie Grimes, an African-American man, was found guilty of rape, despite a thin case against him. Rachlin's profile of Grimes and his 25-year struggle to convince people of his innocence gives resonance and depth to an all-too-common problem. A LIFE OF ADVENTURE AND DELIGHT: Stories, by Akhil Sharma. (Norton, $15.95.) In tales that leap from Delhi to New York, men behave callously (or worse); marriages dissolve unhappily; and immigrants adapt to new societal expectations. At times, Sharma's "cultural detail feels like an airing of secrets," our reviewer, Adrian Tomine, wrote. "It's a testament to the author's sensitive eye for human foibles that these characters are not only palatable but relatable, and this feat of empathy makes the implicit critique sting even more." MODERNITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois From Machiavelli to Bellow, by Steven B. Smith. (Yale, $30.) What does it mean to be modern? This intellectual survey considers the question through the work of writers like Spinoza, Hegel and Nietzsche. Smith, a professor at Yale, arrives at some dour conclusions, but is skilled at bringing abstract concepts to light. A BOY IN WINTER, by Rachel Seiffert. (Vintage, $16.) It's 1941 and Hitler's armies are sweeping across a Ukrainian town. Two Jewish brothers, Yankei and Momik, are hiding out against their father's wishes. Seiffert draws on real wartime accounts in her novel; the story unfolds over three days as the town's residents - including a German engineer and a Ukrainian girl who hides the children - confront wrenching moral choices.
Guardian Review
#+ |9781783784455 |9781783784462 ~ The Ghost Wall author on how both Hilary Mantel and Colette showed her new possibilities, and her lack of stamina for German experimental prose The book I am currently reading Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's Waking Lions . I'm having an Israeli phase because I was in that section of Daunt Books in Marylebone, London. The book that changed my life Colette's Claudine à l'Ecole . I was 16 and it was the first book I read in a language other than English. New worlds opened. The book I wish I'd written The one I promised my US editor last year ... The book that influenced m e Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel showed me the literary possibilities of historical fiction in a new way. The book that is most overrated The one where the white male American literature/history professor has a midlife crisis and sleeps with a student he despises, thus ending the marriage to the wife he despises and obliging him to move in with the mother he despises. I think it's called The Great American Novel. The last book that made me cry? I don't believe in tears as a currency of literary criticism The book that changed my mind Most good books change readers' minds a little, that's what they are for. The book I couldn't finish Most recently, Albert Vigoleis Thelen, The Island of Second Sight . It's very good but I overestimated my capacity for 900 pages of mid-20th century German experimental prose. Generally I'm happy to start more books than I finish. The last book that made me cry I don't believe in tears as a currency of literary criticism. I was appropriately and memorably disturbed by Mercè Rodoreda's brilliant Death in Spring . The last book that made me laugh Nicola Barker's wildness and capacity for the absurd often delight me. The book I'm most ashamed not to have read Quite a lot of literary theory. I've moved my eyes over the pages, but that's not always reading. The book I give as a gift Miriam Toews's All My Puny Sorrows , Eley Williams's Attrib. and Other Stories , Elanor Dymott's Silver & Salt . The book I'd most like to be remembered for I hope I haven't written it yet. My favourite is predictably the least successful, Signs for Lost Children . My earliest reading memory My grandmother, a retired infant school teacher, taught me to read when I was six and everyone else had given up. I'd become deeply embattled about not reading at home and school and then I went to stay with her one half term and she said: "Right, love, now they've all gone shall we sort out this reading business?" She let me climb down with my dignity intact and I went home reading Arthur Ransome. My comfort reading Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs ; Tove Jansson's short stories; Felicity Ford's Knitsonik Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook , which is a sermon against despair as well as a book about knitting.
Kirkus Review
Three very bad days in the Ukraine, November 1941.Seiffert's (The Walk Home, 2014, etc.) contribution to the ever growing shelf of Holocaust fiction provides an emotional close-up of the experiences of several characters in a small Ukrainian town on the day the German troops arrive to round up the Jews, the day the nightmare begins in earnest: a brave, desperate teenage boy who runs off at dawn with his younger brother hours before their other family members are herded with every other Jew in the area into a holding pen. A young woman from the surrounding countryside whose boyfriend has finally returned from service with the defeated Russian troops. That beaten, desperate young man himself, who has no idea what's coming when he next signs up with the Germans. A German engineer who has taken on a road-building project out here in the boonies, naively thinking it will allow him to avoid involvement in the worst crimes of the Reich. As the SS troops storm into town, unleashing a torrent of madness, terror, and murder, the main characters are forced into the most difficult and most important decisions they will ever make. Of course their paths will cross. Of course at least one of them will make a serious mistake. It seems wrong to call a Holocaust novel predictable; the reason we keep retelling and rehearing this story is not because we don't know how it ends. It is because we do. This novel allows the reader to imagine and to empathize, to have a vivid moral experience, while managing to avoid the surfeit of violent, horrific detail that can sometimes result in a kind of genocide porn. All the notes of the Holocaust song, including the rare ray of hope, are played in this spare, fast-moving novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
It may be slim, but this latest from Seiffert (The Walk Home) effectively captures the looming horror of the Holocaust. In World War II Ukraine, as Ephraim is marched into a red brick factory with other Jews, he searches desperately for his two sons, whom he suspects have disregarded German orders to line up. In fact, with little brother Momik in tow, rebellious adolescent Yankel is slipping furtively through the village's back streets, where they are spotted by farmer's daughter Yasia, who is in town to sell apples. She's also hoping to see her fiancé Mykola, who's working with the Germans after having served with the Red Army, a fraught circumstance clarifying the terrible realities of the bloodlands at that time. Yasia decides to shelter the boys, even as the roundup of Jews continues and townsfolk huddle indoors, desperate to deflect danger from themselves and wishing the Jews and hence the Germans would soon be gone. Meanwhile, Otto Pohl, a German engineer helping to build a road through the nearby marshes, comes to realize the full horror of the Nazi regime he's silently opposed, as Seiffert captures events in visceral detail. VERDICT A quietly persuasive work; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 He is out and running in the first grey of morning. Ducked and noiseless, hurrying through the fog drifts with his brother just behind him; feeling the tug of his small fingers twisted in a fistful of his jerkin, crossing the cobbles of the empty town streets, just as day is breaking. Already they have made it past the railway station, the distillery and the cooper's yard, and then all along the silent length of the market street. Unseen, unheard--at least as yet. When they reach the old church at the corner, the boy stops, pulling his young brother close, pressing both of them to the stone walls and listening a moment. He hears nothing and no one; no sounds of movement. The boy's darting eyes see no lamplight behind the curtains, only shutters drawn across the windows. They have been flitting from street to street and hiding, but the boy sees no place here they can slip inside. The fog hangs damp between the houses, and along the winding street before him, shrouding the low roofs and the lane mouths, the huddle of timbered house fronts. At least there is no one here yet to find them. Soon, he thinks. It will come soon now . Didn't the schoolmaster say so? His brother tugs at his fingers, holding up his arms to be lifted, and the boy pulls him onto his back to carry him; still cautious and casting looks about himself, but picking up his pace too. They left the house in darkness, only now the low clouds are paling, and he feels the day and its dangers drawing nearer. He feels his brother shivering too, clutched to his shoulders, the short night's bed- warmth long out of him. But it is better they do this. Better they make for the old schoolmaster's lodgings. They still have more than half the town to cross, but even so: the boy thinks the old schoolmaster will know--who they can turn to, or the best place to lie low. Then comes the flare of headlamps, a sudden glare in the fog beyond them; the crunch of tyres, of heavy vehicles halting on flagstones. His brother grips him, small fists tight and fearful, and then already the boy is turning, already he is running, making for the shelter of one of the town's many alleyways--even before he hears the rumbling of all the many vehicles following. Otto Pohl wakes to the noise of a door slam. One truck door, then another, below his boarding- house window: loud reports echoing across the town square beyond his half- drawn curtains. He must have left them half drawn last night, too weary and chilled to notice. Still fogged with sleep, for a short time all Pohl can see is the leaded squares above his bedpost, framing the town- hall clock and schoolhouse, squat in the autumn mist; this squat and damp place he's been posted. "Zeigt euch!" "Pokazhit'sya!" Is it German? Pohl thinks he hears Ukrainian shouted. But his foremen and workers are all quartered well beyond here, out in open country, and it is too early to be waking, surely. The grey outside is a before- dawn kind, and he has not slept well since he arrived here; Pohl has not been able, and he needs to rest. There is that shouting again. "Mach schon!" Shrill and coarse. Some fool out there is playing at soldiers. Pohl pulls the blankets higher around his shoulders: he will pay them no regard. Who can have any regard for what soldiers do? For armies? he asks his Dorle. Although she is miles from here. His wife is far away in Münster, but Pohl talks to her most mornings. Silently, inwardly, he turns his thoughts homeward, seeking comfort. Thinking of the sound of her, somewhere in the house beyond him; of rising to find her buttoning her coat at the hallway mirror, tucking her curls under the firm hold of her hat brim, then pulling out just enough of them as the bells sound the first service. Or waiting in the pews with their small daughter while she takes communion, before walking home again, arm in arm through the Sunday Altstadt quiet. But now more trucks are arriving, loud below his window. And although Pohl has his covers pulled against them, he is awake. Thoughts of home can't block them out. Or that shouting either. "Ihr sollt euch zeigen!" Too loud to ignore, it has Pohl confounded; it has him disordered, sitting up, pulling on his shirt. He can't find his glasses. He has to get up to feel for them: on the desk at his bedside, in his engineering corps trousers hanging on the chair back; and all the while it continues, this bellowing and ordering, this ungodly noise at this ungodly hour of the morning. Pohl hears dull thuds falling as he fumbles down the unlit stairwell. Are they hammer blows? Discharges? He can only half make them out through the thick boarding- house walls as he reaches the foot of the staircase, searching his tunic pockets, still looking for his glasses. The stoves are all dark, and there is no one in the kitchen. Up even before the housemaid, Pohl has the out- of- sorts feeling this day has started far too early; it has started all wrong somehow. Stooping at the window beside the low front entrance, he finds his glasses, finally, and hooks them over his ears, peering across to the town hall, looking for the clock, sure it has missed its hourly strike--or is he the one who has missed it? What he sees out there brings him up short. Soldiers. On the town square. Field- grey uniforms: Wehrmacht in the fog. It is not the first time he's seen field grey here. Although he's told Dorle the territory is secure now. It has been secured for rebuilding; they are done with their Blitzkrieg, I can promise you this much. Pohl is careful with his words to her; in his weekly letters, of course, because--the times being what they are--heaven knows who might read them; but also in his daily mumbled thoughts and reports, because Pohl feels Dorle deserves this care--she would hate so much of what he sees here. The SS convoys, for one thing. Excerpted from A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
