Peeling the Onion
A Memoir

Gunter Grass died last night, and I am in mourning. Discovering his writing was like discovering a new uncle, one who spent WW2 on the wrong side of the war. I read this book aboard an El Al flight to Israel, where those of us who knew and loved my mother were gathering at the cemetery in Beit Sheme......more

They had tried doing it by themselves in her room with a cheap onion, but it wasn't the same. You needed an audience. It was so much easier to cry in company. It gave you a real sense of brotherhood in sorrow when to the right and left of you and in the gallery overhead your fellow students were all......more

In 1975, in my college days, I saw Gunter Grass for the first time in my family’s living room in Calcutta. He came to see my father, a filmmaker. At that time we just knew him as a German writer who wrote The Tin Drum. Later I heard from some people who expressed their disapproval of him as a Nazi, w......more

Reading this intriguing memoir, I wondered why Grass wrote it. To expiate himself from the crimes of the Waffen SS to whom he had been attached at the tender age of 17? To pin down events before a fading memory lost them forever? Or to take the high road and cling to the claim that he never fired a......more

En esta memoria Grass nos relata su infancia en la ciudad de Danzig (una ciudad con un régimen político especial, pero cuyos habitantes se identificaban como alemanes), su adolescencia, sus experiencias en la guerra y la posguerra. Esta publicación fue muy polémica puesto que solo en 2006 Grass reve......more