Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning

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Product Details
Price
$19.00  $17.67
Publisher
St. Martins Press-3PL
Publish Date
Pages
176
Dimensions
8.4 X 5.5 X 0.4 inches | 0.45 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780312420451
BISAC Categories:

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About the Author

Paul Steinberg was born in Berlin in 1926 and immigrated to France at the age of seven. Deported to Auschwitz in l943, he was the only member of his family to survive the war. After liberation, Steinberg returned to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1999.

Reviews

"The most powerful and important Holocaust account to be published in recent years." --Murray Schwartz, Professor of Writing, Literature and Publishing, Emerson College

"It is unlikely that there will be a memoir of more terse power than Paul Steinberg's Speak You Also, a testimony from within the chamber of evil itself that performs the duty of memory with a special kind of pain and meaning . . . An important and unforgettable document . . . The mystery deepens, why some men are beasts, why most are not, and how, to survive, one has to have a little of the beast in oneself. Steinberg's book is saturated with those questions, which haunted this unlikely author for decades and now, thanks to his remarkable little volume [will] haunt us as well." --Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

"A searing philosophical memoir . . . In Speak You Also, which is eloquently translated from the French by Linda Coverdale with Bill Ford, Steinberg cryptically ravels and unravels his past . . . 'Perhaps I survived so that I might give an account, one of the very last, that is both passionate and serene, ' he writes. 'A delivery, however long overdue, is still deliverance.'" --Susan Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review

"A riveting analysis of the effect of barbaric acts on the human mind . . . His account is disturbing, powerful reading. We cannot be as hard on him as Levi was or as hard as he is on himself. His transgressions were small, compared to his punishment." --Linda Matchan, The Boston Globe

"A work of permanent significance. I find it hard to imagine reading Levi's classic work except in tandem with Steinberg's brief for the defense." --Lawrence N. Powell, The Nation

"This is an exceptional work of witness, cold, precise, drained of pathos and often unbearable because of its dryness. In his pitiless self-searching, Paul Steinberg has given us a kind of response to those dreadful events that we have not had before . . . an indispensable book." --Jorge Semprun, author of Literature of Life

"Steinberg shows not the slightest trace of self-pity . . . Instead, there's detachment and a refusal to shrink from even the harshest of confessions that separates this text from many others on the same subject. More than a reconstitution of his experience, Steinberg is engaged in a poignant dialogue with Primo Levi's indictment, bringing us face to face with the most difficult questions about survival and humanity." --Claude Lantzmann, producer, director, and author of Shoah

"With an alert detachment devoid of self-pity and anger alike, Paul Steinberg speaks from the heart of his experience . . . He is an essential witness." --John Felstiner, author of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew

"What is striking in Paul Steinberg's way of telling the story, what makes his testimony so very different, is his detached, glacial, pitiless tone. Tinged with black humor, Steinberg's voice restores the madness of the camps in all its cruelty and violence and barbarism." --Myriam Anissimov, author of Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist

"With brutal honesty and frightening self-examination, Steinberg dissects himself and forces readers to reexamine what mortality means in the face of unremitting horror." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)