Word: lind
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...remarkable book, Soul of Wood, Jakov Lind fixed the grayed and monstrous mindscape of wartime Germany more vividly than any other writer except Günter Grass. It is surprising, therefore, to realize that Lind, who was born in Vienna and lived out the war in Holland and Germany, is not a German author at all and now does not even write in German, his first language. He is, in fact, a 42-year-old Londoner (by adoption) who writes in English. His past still troubles him so that he refuses, for instance, to read the writing of most Germans...
...list begins with his parents-Viennese Jews who managed to ship him to Holland in 1938-and includes language, religion, several nationalities and identities. "To be schizophrenic is to be normal," Lind writes. The war followed him to Holland. Successive Nazi raids emptied Amsterdam's Jewish quarter, and Lind bought a new Aryan identity. His forged papers proved him to be Jan Overbeek, a 17-year-old Dutch laborer with an Austrian mother. At first, he recalls, "I spent most of my time studying my face in the mirror. I was Jan Overbeek, yes. But I didn...
...forced himself to show a Dutchman's overt hatred of Germans, and to feel indifference toward Jews (as Jakov Lind he had despised, in the way a boy despises dull relatives, the Jews who let themselves be freighted off to concentration camps). Because Dutch laborers do not write, he stopped his habitual scribbling. "Writing was something I dreamed to do again in peacetime, something beautiful and pleasant that will only occur when one is allowed to live again. Jan Overbeek is a ghost, a shadow, a piece of printed paper with a fingerprint and a signature . . . 'I wish...
Eventually, anyone young and healthy in Holland was likely to be questioned by the Nazis. Boldly, Lind-Overbeek escaped to Germany. He worked, drank, survived bombardment, whored and eventually landed a surreal job carrying reports from an industrialist's factory, which did metallurgical research, to the German Air Ministry. When the war ended, he set off, walking, for Holland. At the border, he molted another skin, persuading British officials that he was really Jakov Chaklan, born in Palestine. With a new identity card, he journeyed to Marseille and smuggled himself aboard a ship loaded with refugees bound for Israel...
...autobiography is complete unless its writer arranges to fall dead across the last page of corrected proofs, and Lind's account is no exception. But the book has a certain unity. At the end, young Lind has fled and fumbled his way backward from extinction to his tribal beginnings, and is now as ready as any two-year-old to start life...