A Child al Confino: The True Story of a Jewish Boy and His Mother in Mussolini's Italy [Bargain Price] [Hardcover] Eric Lamet (Author)
Book DescriptionEric Lamet was only seven years old when the Nazis invaded Vienna--and changed his life and the lives of all European Jews forever. Five days after Hitler marches, Eric Lamet and his parents flee for their lives. His father goes back to his native Poland--and never comes back. His mother hides out in Italy, on the run from place to place, taking her son deeper and deeper into the mountains to avoid capture.In this remarkable feat of memory and imagination, Lamet recreates the Italy he knew from the perspective of the scared and lonely child he once was. We not only see the hardships and terrors faced by foreign Jews in Fascist Italy, but also the friends Eric makes and his mother's valiant efforts to make a home for him.
In a style as original as his story, the author vividly recalls a dark time yet imbues his recollections with humor, humanity, and wit. Very few Holocaust memoirs address the plight of Jews sent into internal exile in Mussolini's Italy. Lamet offers a rare and historically important portrait, one you will not soon forget.
In a style as original as his story, the author vividly recalls a dark time yet imbues his recollections with humor, humanity, and wit. Very few Holocaust memoirs address the plight of Jews sent into internal exile in Mussolini's Italy. Lamet offers a rare and historically important portrait, one you will not soon forget.
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Most accounts of Holocaust survival are centered on central or eastern Europe, in which the Nazi program of genocide was so explicit. Although Mussolini and his Fascist minions were not necessarily genocidal in intention, they were still virulently anti-Semitic as this engrossing and moving account reveals. Lamet was born in Vienna. When he was seven, his family’s middle-class existence was shattered by the Nazi seizure of Austria. His father fled to Poland, where he presumably perished in a death camp. Lamet and his mother made a harrowing escape to Italy, where they spent months seeking refuge in various isolated mountain villages. They resided in a southern rural hamlet east of Naples until the Allied liberation in 1943. Lamet recounts his mother’s struggles to provide a secure home for her child while both attempt to adjust from their urban, relatively sophisticated background to life in what initially appears to be a bleak, primitive setting. This memoir will be an excellent addition to Holocaust collections. --Jay Freeman
From the Author
A CHILD AL CONFINO is an uplifting book, Although written about the Holocaust period, it is not a Holocaust book It is a story of hope and love, with much humor and wit in times when sadness and tragedy filled the days of our lives.
The editor of HEED Magazine, Jeffrey Newelt, describes the book as following: "All great Holocaust memoirs make you cry. Not all make you laugh as well, but Eric Lamet does, with a dark, dry humane wit that you can tell served the author during his time as a boy in Mussolini's Italy."
An English College professor indicated: "The tribute to your mother that runs through the book is the finest homage to a mother that I have read since reading 'Promise at Dawn'."
Writing the book for me was a catharsis. I lived through each event as I wrote it, being able to see the people, the venues and the happenings as they had occurred many years before and making the experience of creating this work both sad and happy.
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