Word: linde
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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COUNTING MY STEPS, by Jakov Lind. The author of Soul of Wood recalls his schizophrenic years in Nazi and postwar Europe, when his survival depended on how convincingly he could change his nationality, language and religion...
COUNTING MY STEPS, by Jakov Lind. The author of Soul of Wood recalls his schizophrenic years in Nazi and postwar Europe, when his survival depended on how convincingly he could change his nationality, language and religion...
...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...