Bring Us the Old People

Bring Us the Old People

Maimie hid from Hitler during the Holocaust, and from her guilt ever since. A brilliant debut! Stark may be a 25-year-old Princeton grad, but her heroine is an anguished 92-year-old Holocaust survivor who recalls delivering up her parents to the Nazis (they ordered everyone in the village to "bring us the old people so that we may kill them") and then hiding with her husband for three years. Observed the publicist, "The book has received glowing reviews and has exceeded our sales expectations." (LJ 7/98) n Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. Reading Stark's deceptively simple first novel is like listening to an oral history that was recorded at a nursing home for Jewish men and women. We hear the voice of a remarkable woman telling her own story. Now over 90 and, according to her nephew Milton (but disputed by Maime herself), no longer able to live on her own, Maime spends her time recalling the past and mourning the losses she has sustained. Living in a Polish shtetl during most of the first half of the twentieth century, Maime's early years were happy ones. This childhood happiness helped her to endure an unhappy marriage and the dislocations, betrayals, and horrors of the Holocaust and, finally, to make a success of her new life in America after the war. Yet in Maime's mind, her accomplishments pale when she remembers the choice she was forced to make when the Nazis came to her Polish town, a decision that determined the fate of her beloved parents. This is an excellent choice for public libraries. Nancy Pearl A first novel by a New Yorkbased poet and story writer that doesnt leave the reader waiting for more. Starks a grimly derivative tale of the Holocaust is recounted in the first person by Maime, a nonagenarian Polish Jewish woman who survived the war by hiding in a series of farms owned by sympathetic Gentiles. At the outset, Maime is living in a residence for the elderly, bitterly resentful of her nephews apparent largesse, and eager to tell of her life in Poland before and during the war (although its unclear to whom shes speaking). Her marriage at 16 to Saul is a mistake; shes too young, and he turns out to be sterile. There is tension between her and her mother-in-law, and she misses her adored parents. When the Nazis come, everything falls apart around her: shes left with little more than a cache of American dollars, the will to survive, and a terrible secret. This secret, which might have served as the pivot of the entire narrative, is telegraphed by the books title, again in its first chapter, and is mentioned throughout. Worse still, it is first revealed almost in passing, tossed off in the context of a conversation between Maime and her sister, who spent the war years in New York. By the time the events in question are laboriously replayed, the reader has long since ceased to care. There is virtually nothing original here: the situations, the characters, the historical events, all have been used dozens of times before to greater effect. Starks slender volume rambles like the recollections, indeed, of an elderly person; the diction is a grotesque parody of a Polish Jews broken English. One hesitates to dismiss a book as sincerely meant as this one, but as literature its a void. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.