Still Alive, Ruth Kluger
Still Alive, Ruth Kluger
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
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Still Alive
A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered

Author: Ruth Kluger, Lore Segal

Narrator: Natasha Soudek

Unabridged: 10 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/24/2021


Synopsis

A controversial bestseller likened to Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Still Alive is a harrowing and fiercely bittersweet Holocaust memoir of survival: "a book of breathtaking honesty and extraordinary insight" (Los Angeles Times).

Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps which would become the setting for her precarious childhood.

Interwoven with blunt, unsparing observations of childhood and nuanced reflections of an adult who has spent a lifetime thinking about the Holocaust, Still Alive rejects all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal. Whether describing the abuse she met at her own mother's hand, the life-saving generosity of a woman SS aide in Auschwitz, the foibles and prejudices of Allied liberators, or the cold shoulder offered by her relatives when she and her mother arrived as refugees in New York, Kluger sees and names an unexpected reality which has little to do with conventional wisdom or morality tales.

About Ruth Kluger

Ruth Kluger (1931-2020) was a literary scholar, memoirist, and a professor emerita of German at the University of California, Irvine. She previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Virginia, and was a guest professor in Gottingen, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. As the author of five books of literary criticism, she also studied English literature, obtained a master's degree in 1952, and a PhD in 1967. Dr. Kluger survived internment at Auschwitz, fleeing a death march in 1945, eventually immigrating to New York, and beginning her lifelong work in academia and writing. After an accident-related days-long coma, Dr. Kluger was moved to recall long-repressed memories of the war, which served as the impetus for her memoir, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Liz on May 30, 2013

what I most liked about this book was the way Kluger simultaneously asserts uncomfortable and contradictory things like: it's terrible when people assume that the catastrophe of the Holocaust must somehow have made people better, wiser, more loving, but it's also terrible when people don't recognise......more

Goodreads review by Kaltmamsell on May 20, 2021

Ruth Klügers weiter leben: Eine Jugend ausgelesen, durchgehend gefesselt und bereichert davon. Ich hatte Klüger 2012 in Klagenfurt erlebt, wo die kluge, schöne greise Frau die "Rede zur Literatur" gehalten hatte, die Notizen dazu auf einem Kindle in der Hand (wie jeder und jede erwähnen, die dabei w......more

Goodreads review by Sparrow on September 21, 2013

A very different Holocaust survival memoir than I am used to. Kluger purposefully wrote this memoir for a different purpose - this was not meant to show us what we already know about the Holocaust. This does not look at grotesque portraits of concentration camp conditions or satanic SS generals and......more

Goodreads review by Kuszma on November 04, 2019

Ez egy baromi fontos könyv a holokausztról. Egyrészt azért, mert nagyon erős női szemszöget visz be a témába – ebben a kontextusban a zsidó nő tulajdonképpen kettős áldozat, áldozata a náciknak, és jóval kisebb mértékben ugyan, de áldozata a patriarchális hagyománynak is, ami megtiltja neki, hogy ka......more

Goodreads review by Laura on December 30, 2008

"Instead of God I believe in ghosts" This was a very different memoir than the others I've read. I think because the author is a writer and her story doesn't have the direct simplicity of someone just telling their story of survival. She is more abstract and more analytical. Her story has a sharper......more