Come to This Court and Cry, Linda Kinstler
Come to This Court and Cry, Linda Kinstler
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Come to This Court and Cry
How the Holocaust Ends

Author: Linda Kinstler

Narrator: Laurence Bouvard

Unabridged: 9 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 08/23/2022


Synopsis

A few years ago Linda Kinstler discovered that a man fifty years dead – a former Nazi who belonged to the same killing unit as her grandfather – was the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation in Latvia. The proceedings threatened to pardon his crimes. They put on the line hard-won facts about the Holocaust at the precise moment that the last living survivors – the last legal witnesses – were dying.

Across the world, Second World War-era cases are winding their way through the courts. Survivors have been telling their stories for the better part of a century, and still judges ask for proof. Where do these stories end? What responsibilities attend their transmission, so many generations on? How many ghosts need to be put on trial for us to consider the crime scene of history closed?

In this major non-fiction debut, Linda Kinstler investigates both her family story and the archives of ten nations to examine what it takes to prove history in our uncertain century. Probing and profound, Come to this Court and Cry is about the nature of memory and justice when revisionism, ultra-nationalism and denialism make it feel like history is slipping out from under our feet. It asks how the stories we tell about ourselves, our families and our nations are passed down, how we alter them, and what they demand of us.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jen on March 22, 2022

Part history, part investigative memoir, Come to this Court and Cry is an intelligent account of the Holocaust in Latvia as told through the lens of the law. Exploring the sensitive subject of historical revisionism through the ongoing case of Herberts Cukurs, Kinstler poses the question what if the......more

Goodreads review by Annie on July 04, 2024

It’s been 77 years since the end of World War II and the Holocaust. We know a lot about what happened but, as Linda Kinstler finds as she tries to track down any information about a grandfather who disappeared, there are things that we will never know. Documents were destroyed. Mass graves were obli......more

Goodreads review by Matt on March 13, 2024

This was a thoughtful memoir that explores a famous holocaust era war crimes case in Latvia. Kinzler touches on the Nuremberg trials and considers their promise and failures while exploring the killing of a famous Latvian SS agent by Mossad in the mid 1960s. Along the way, Kinzler considers the impa......more

Goodreads review by Anna on November 08, 2022

An exceptional book. Reflective, intelligent, sad. The epitome of looking at an object from all sides. Kinstler’s connection to the holocaust in Latvia just means she gets close to the heart of the thing. Highly recommended.......more

Goodreads review by Paul on July 27, 2023

Mind bending.......more


Quotes

“In her completely absorbing and profound debut, Kinstler sets out to solve a mystery—journeying from a murder scene in Uruguay to the former killing fields of Europe to unravel a family secret about her late grandfather—and in the process unearths vexing questions about the past and how we understand it. Part detective story, part family history, part probing inquiry into how best to reckon with the horrors of a previous century, Come to This Court and Cry is bracingly original, beautifully written, and haunting. An astonishing book.”—Patrick Radden Keefe

“Obviously a masterpiece. A book that makes the Holocaust fresh, slipping seamlessly between story, thinking, politics, poetry, and the personal.”—Peter Pomerantsev

“Linda Kinstler has achieved something truly unusual: A book that captures the paradoxes and nuances of memory politics in contemporary Eastern Europe, while at the same time invoking the trauma that past tragedies leave on individuals and families. Using rigorous, evocative prose, she reminds us of the dangerous instability of truth and testimony, and the urgent need, in the twenty-first century, to keep telling the history of the twentieth.”—Anne Applebaum

“In this searching and powerful book, Kinstler sets out to solve the mystery of her grandfather’s role in the genocide of Latvia’s Jews during World War II. But the questions she ends up confronting—about national pride, the need for heroes, and the elusiveness of the past—couldn’t be more relevant in the twenty-first century. Come to This Court and Cry is an exemplary work of investigative journalism and historical research, showing why writers like Kinstler are needed now more than ever.”—Adam Kirsch

“First, I was moved, then I was gripped, and now I am haunted by Kinstler’s astonishing new book. Its story is a universal one and its contribution to Jewish thinking about the Holocaust is considerable.”—Ben Judah

“Before reading (devouring) Come to This Court and Cry, I wouldn’t have thought a book like this was even possible. A moving family portrait on top of a sensational whodunit murder on top of a brilliant mediation on memory, the law, and identity? And yet here it is. Kinstler has threaded the needle. This book is many things, and yet it fits together perfectly—personal without being sentimental, creative without being precious, and has such astute legal and historical analyses without being ponderous; it’s a marvel.”—Menachem Kaiser