Sarah Bagby's book reviews can be heard on alternate Mondays on KMUW 89.1.
Here's a transcript of her most recent review.
"Our Only Hope: Eddie's Holocaust Story and the Weisz Family Correspondence"
by Keith H. Pickus
Keith Pickus, associate provost and history professor at Wichita State
University, became the steward of a coveted find for any historian: a wealth
of letters written from 1938 to 1942 to Eddie Weisz, a German Jew who
emigrated to America at age 21. Eddie received the letters from his parents
as they moved from Germany to Prague before falling victim to the Nazi
regime. Typical for the time, the Weisz family had sent their eldest son to
America to pave the way for the rest of the family to follow.
In the new book "Our Only Hope," Pickus interprets the letters sent by
Eddie's father Henrich, who was a prosperous merchant, by his mother
Johanna, and by Eddie's younger brother Ernst, who adored and idolized him.
The letters allow one family's experience to exemplify those of many others
and to show how voices subtly change with the stress and challenge of being
shuffled from place to place. The family stoically tries to preserve their
dignity as they place their hopes for the future in Eddie.
"Our Only Hope" makes immediate the tragedy of lives lost to the Holocaust,
and the double-edged experience of those who survived.
Review by Sarah
Bagby, May 1, 2008
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