Get Free Ebook On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun

Get Free Ebook On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun

The book appearance is also sufficient. Even there is wise words to not to judge the book from its cover. However, when the cover has been intriguing, it will fairly attract you to check out the in or web content of guide. Moreover, the selection of words as well as organize to be title is very affecting. It will specify exactly what you the author will utter to the readers. Those elements appropriate enough with the idea of this On Burning Ground, By Michael Skakun So, you may not have to be bothered with that.

On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun

Get Free Ebook On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun

Let's have a look at the resources that always provide favorable things. Influences can be the reasons of how the people life runs. To obtain one of the resources, you can find the interesting point to get. Just what's that? Book! Yeah, book is the most effective tool that can be made use of for affecting your life. Reserve will certainly not guarantee you to be excellent people, yet when you review the book and undertake the positive things, you will certainly be a wonderful person.

This is among your favorite publications, right? That's true. If this is among them, you can begin by reviewing page by page for this publication. The reasons may not be so difficult. We provide you a good book that will certainly not just inspire you however also reveal you truth life. When getting this book to check out, it will be so various when you review others. This is a new coming publication that makes this world so shacked. For the sake of your life, you can get lots of choices as well as benefits create this On Burning Ground, By Michael Skakun

Don't bother if you don't have sufficient time to visit guide establishment as well as search for the favourite book to review. Nowadays, the on the internet book On Burning Ground, By Michael Skakun is coming to provide simplicity of checking out behavior. You may not should go outside to look guide On Burning Ground, By Michael Skakun Searching and also downloading the book entitle On Burning Ground, By Michael Skakun in this short article will certainly provide you far better solution. Yeah, on-line e-book On Burning Ground, By Michael Skakun is a kind of digital book that you can enter the web link download supplied.

Having this book however never trying to read is sort of rubbish. You should review it also few. Checking out by few is truly better than nothing. You can delight in reading by beginning in the really delightful time. The moment where you could truly filter the information needed from this publication. The On Burning Ground, By Michael Skakun will certainly be so useful when you truly understand just what really this publication provides. So, locate your on method to see how your selection regarding the new life within guide.

Amazon.com Review

The "burning ground" of the title is not just the blasted landscape of Holocaust-era Europe but also the existential anguish of its protagonist, rabbinical student Joseph Skakun, so seared by the evils he has witnessed that at one desperate moment suicide seems the only possible response. Joseph was one of very few Jews in his northern Polish village to escape extermination at the end of 1941, and his odyssey of survival took him into the very "maw of the beast." Assuming the identity of a Muslim Tatar (to account for his circumcision), he traveled to Germany as a foreign laborer. Later, fleeing the suspicions of a fellow worker, he enlisted in the Waffen SS, an act of crushing ethical ambiguity for a young man steeped in the Jewish tradition of Mussar, which stressed moral self-examination. After the war, consumed by the need to convey and come to grips with his experiences, Joseph made a confidant of his son, the author of this galvanizing biography and memoir. Retelling his father's story, Michael Skakun pens a drama of biblical breadth and Dostoyevskian depth, scanting neither the visceral horror of his father's ordeal nor the resourcefulness and resolve that enabled Joseph to endure. --Wendy Smith

Read more

From Publishers Weekly

Distinguished both by outstanding writing and a profound sense of moral complexity, this son's memoir of his father's incredible survival stands out among Holocaust memoirs. In 1941, when the Nazi noose tightened around Navaredok, Poland, Joseph Skakun, a young Talmudic scholar, tried to save his mother from death by hiding her in a basement. After his efforts failed and the Jews were rounded up, Joseph escaped into the forest and fled to Vilna, where he managed to borrow a birth certificate from Stefan Osmanov, an acquaintance who was a Muslim Tatar. Because he was blue-eyed and blond, Joseph was able to assume Osmanov's identity. "But here father, thrown back on his own slight resources, secretly crafted a new identity out of whole clothAcreated a mask so tight-fitting that it became nearly one with his life." Joseph quickly learned the rudiments of Islam, and, since Muslims were also circumcised, he was accepted into the German foreign labor program in Berlin. Assigned to farm work, Joseph tried to keep to himself but was drawn into village social life. When a fellow laborer became suspicious, Joseph enlisted in the SS out of desperation. Fortunately, the war ended before he was mobilizedAthus, according to the author, his father was saved from truly collaborating with Hitler. Skakun, an editor and translator who has served as a special consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial council, offers an unusual and gripping account of resourcefulness, narrow escapes and "moral improvisation." B&w photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Read more

See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Hardcover: 256 pages

Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (June 1, 1999)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 031220566X

ISBN-13: 978-0312205669

Product Dimensions:

6.4 x 1 x 9.6 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.0 out of 5 stars

7 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#395,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

     My wife and I had the pleasure of being Sabbath eve meal guests along with the author, Michael Skakun, who told us some of the remarkable stories about his father's survival during the Holocaust by boldly assuming other identifies -- including as a Waffen SS recruit. Michael directed us to his book, which I found fascinating. It is a worthwhile addition to the body of Holocaust literature.     The author has merged both his father's detailed, harrowing recollections with skillful narration as if he's seeing through his father's eyes, and feeling through his feelings. He also fills out the narration with background information and literary references.       Take the time out to read this book. You'll get a glimpse of the determination of the Nazis to utterly wipe out European Jewry, and of the miracles that kept Michael's father Joseph alive to recount his experiences to the next generation. Â

Michael Skakun, son of Joseph Skakun, is an American Jew writing his father's story of escape from Novogrudek in Poland during WWII. The writing is somewhat erudite, and clearly this son Michael is a well-educated American, well versed in Yiddish and Hebrew culture and languages, as well as Polish, Russian and German. Some readers may find these many foreign phrases interspersed in the text to be irritating, but I was impressed and also amused, for it revealed the strong Ashkenazi roots and identity of the son.Michael Skakun's writing is also very meaty, very concrete and exciting, satisfying to read. His word choices and sentence structures are like chunks of good Polish stew, rather than the watered-down soups some WWII books offer.As for the almost-unbelievable story of Joseph, his father, a Yeshiva student in a small town, who with his blonde hair and blue eyes can pass for a gentile: well, it has to be read to be believed. He sees his people slaughtered by "Nazi killers and their Baltic henchmen", yet escapes, to live as a Christian for some time, doing hard labor, then to become a Tatar Muslim, hoping that a false Muslim identity paper could explain his circumcision. In both deceptions, he must pay attention closely to the language, body movements and behavior of these two groups, so that he can mimic them properly and pass amongst them without suspicion.In a labor camp in Germany, he finds love with a Russian named Tatyana, and his claim to fame there is as a crooner, singing in Polish and Russian. Yet in the simplest of ways he could betray his Jewish background,a s in the the chanting of a Russian song about a nightingale. He used the word "dolya", meaning destiny, for that was the version he'd always known. He sang the refrain, "He remained a luckless orphan abandoned to his destiny", whereupon a Ukrainian laborer, Ivan, grumbled "in chilly disapproval", "Don't say 'dolya', Jews like to use that word." Each small mistake in his Polish or Russian, even in memorized lyrics, could reveal his Yiddish native tongue, so he became paranoid about how he spoke to others. Tatyana took off with an Ukrainian SS man; the other laborers commiserated with him about the fickleness of beautiful women.There are so many unexpected twists and turns in this young Jew's fate, with his cleverness and courage knowing no bounds, that the reader is gripped to the very end. Joseph Skakun's disappointment in so many different ethnic groups of Europe are based on solid experiences with them, living and working amongst them. Everywhere he faces antisemitism, which can erupt if his true birthright were known.The complaints about this novel, that it can be confusing since the son is writing about his father, rather than having the book put in the first person: well, it can be said that it is often confusing since the writer calls the main character "Father". However, with a bit of concentration, this is no obstacle.The writer is also uncondescending, assuming that the reader is familiar with Europe, WWII, Ashkenazi Jewish concepts and foreign languages. The influence of the father's early yeshiva education comes into each situation, as he finds himself yet again faced with difficulties, he would remember what the rabbis had taught him years earlier about life. For example, at Christmas time, at his job on a German farm as an Ostarbeiter (East-worker), a 400-lb pig is slaughtered for the feast, and Joseph is forced to help in the job of butchering. The son writes, "In ordinary times it would be unthinkable for a rabbinical student like Father to touch a swine, dead or alive. How different biblical sacrifices in the Pentateuch were from this ghastly sight!...Had not the scribe Eleazar resisted unto death the Hellenic Syrians who tried to force him into contact with the unclean animal, racking and torturing him when he refused?... For the Nazis every Jew was a Judensau."All in all, this is one of the better Holocaust survivor books of the war, in the interesting details, academic commentary of the son, the continuous action and danger, the reflection on life done in different languages. The author is naturally prejudiced against the German language and way of life, giving even the language a jab as given to mendacity, with an example: The Horst Wessel Song, the famous Nazi marching song. Well, there is blindness in us all, so we can overlook a few silly observations as that one, comparing the magnificent language of Goethe and Schiller to the cretinous words set to a cabaret melody.Thanks for writing, son of Joseph Skakun, and mourn not for the grandfather who couldn't make it in 1906 materialistic America! Nor the grandmother Rochelle who couldn't "find work" in Leeds, so making your father born to two Western world-returnees...I found out only recently that my own Irish grandfather, an unhappy man in America, returned to his farm in Northern Ireland at about the age of 60, hoping to go back to his old life (leaving five kids back in San Francisco), only to find that the people and he himself had changed in his years away. He wrote poetry and yearned for his homeland all his life. I wonder if the Skakun grandfather's story could also be interesting: after four years of presumably low-level labor - ah, welcome to America when you have no money or connections!!! how else can a nation get rich without cheap immigrant labor like your grandfather to do the scheiss-jobs? - well, his shock at returning to a small Jewish shtetl in Poland must be an interesting story in itself. And then he had to survive there, too!I encourage the author to write another book, simply because his writing style and erudition is a pleasure for us.

Michael Skakun's book, "On Burning Ground", makes for a unique memoir as it is the story of his father's experiences during WWII, and not his own experiences, or even his interactions with his father. Joseph Skakun led an extremely interesting, almost unbelievable life, as he did everything he could to evade detection as a Jew and survive the war. It is a story that will leave readers amazed, questioning how anyone had the strength to do what Joseph Skakun forced himself to do.Joseph's story begins in December 1941, when the Germans come to his town to liquidate it. He tries desperately to escape with his mother, but in the end, he is the only member of his family (as far as he knows) to survive a mass execution. Skakun escapes not once, but twice, from the ghetto, slowly making his way into Lithuania, and finally Germany, where he worked as a farm laborer. His command of several languages helped him along the way, as he gradually assumed the identity of a Muslim from the countryside, hoping that the similarities between Islam and Judaism would help him elude detection. Eventually, he realized that the only way he could guarantee his own safety from the growing suspicions of other laborers was to join the Waffen SS. As Joseph prepared to step fully into the machinery that has been responsible for the destruction of his people, he questioned his actions but knew there is no other way. If he ccould get close to the front, he could escape once and for all."On Burning Ground" is a fascinating story, generally well-told, with details that bring Joseph's experiences to life. Joseph's survival is in part due to luck, but more greatly due to his resolve and his ability to forsake outwardly everything that he held dear. Michael Skakun does an admirable job telling his father's story, and examining what his father must have been going through emotionally and psychologically. I thought it an odd choice to narrate as did, refering to the main character as Father rather than taking a third or first person point of view. At times certain elements seem repetitive, but overall Skakun paints an incredible potrait of a remarkable man. It is an unique story of hope that comes from such sorrow. It is a story that needs to be told.

On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun PDF
On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun EPub
On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun Doc
On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun iBooks
On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun rtf
On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun Mobipocket
On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun Kindle

On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun PDF

On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun PDF

On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun PDF

On Burning Ground, by Michael Skakun PDF