The Kommandant's Mistress

Rating:
Summary: the kommandant's mistress
Review: As a student of the Holocaust, an interviewer of Holocaust survivors, and a writer/ professor of Holocaust fiction, I cannot recommend Ms. Szeman's book highly enough. Her research is meticulous and the breadth of imagination she uses to flesh out the historical detail for her readers is staggering. Also admirable is the stark prose with which she delineates the most horrific of experiences--perhaps the only way a tale of this sort can be told. And her depiction of von Walther, the Kommandant, is immensely compelling psychological portraiture. ...The kalidoscopic method of narration--juxtaposing and splicing the characters' experiences together in a series of snapshots--has been mentioned by other reviewers; I think it's one of the book's strengths and would be delighted to engage in a dialogue with Ms. Szeman or any of her students as to how/ why she chose this paricular method. I can be contacted at [e-mail] In any case, for any serious student of writing and/ or the Holocaust, this book is a must.

Rating:
Summary: the kommandant's mistress
Review: As a student of the Holocaust, an interviewer of Holocaust survivors, and a writer/ professor of Holocaust fiction, I cannot recommend Ms. Szeman's book highly enough. Her research is meticulous and the breadth of imagination she uses to flesh out the historical detail for her readers is staggering. Also admirable is the stark prose with which she delineates the most horrific of experiences--perhaps the only way a tale of this sort can be told. And her depiction of von Walther, the Kommandant, is immensely compelling psychological portraiture. ...The kalidoscopic method of narration--juxtaposing and splicing the characters' experiences together in a series of snapshots--has been mentioned by other reviewers; I think it's one of the book's strengths and would be delighted to engage in a dialogue with Ms. Szeman or any of her students as to how/ why she chose this paricular method. I can be contacted at [e-mail] In any case, for any serious student of writing and/ or the Holocaust, this book is a must.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating, wrenching and daring novel.
Review: Sherri Szeman, in her novel, "The Kommandant's Mistress," takes one risk after another. She dares to play with time and setting, generally changing scenes and characters in the middle of a page, so that the reader must scramble to keep his bearings. The Kommandant of the title, Max von Walther, professes to despise Jews, and he kills them without compunction. Yet, he boldly takes a beautiful Jewish deportee into his office and his life, in spite of the protests of his furious wife. Szeman tells her story from various points of view, first from the viewpoint of the Kommandant, then from the viewpoint of his mistress, and finally from the "official viewpoint". Another daring move is Szeman's presentation of often horrifying events without much embellishment. She depicts the situtations as a series of snapshots, one after another, quickly and relentlessly. For example, Szeman depicts the Kommandant's daughter, Ilse, repeating the vicious Jew-hating comments that she hears from her elders, each word coming out like a horrible profanity from the mouth of an innocent child. In another scene, the Kommandant implores his mistress to take his gun and help him to commit suicide. Will she pull the trigger? The effect of this staccato narrative style is similar to a punch in the stomach. It is traumatizing to contemplate constantly changing scenarios of deportations, physical and mental torture, and murder. Szeman seems to be saying that there is no way to tell such a story in a linear way. Only by being cryptic and non-linear can one begin to capture the emotional trauma of events that are not within the scope of most people's experience. Szeman is a poet, as well as a novelist, and her novel at times approaches poetry in its tremendous emotional impact. I highly recommend this book to readers who are interested in Holocaust literature that is challenging and thought-provoking.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating, wrenching and daring novel.
Review: Sherri Szeman, in her novel, "The Kommandant's Mistress," takes one risk after another. She dares to play with time and setting, generally changing scenes and characters in the middle of a page, so that the reader must scramble to keep his bearings. The Kommandant of the title, Max von Walther, professes to despise Jews, and he kills them without compunction. Yet, he boldly takes a beautiful Jewish deportee into his office and his life, in spite of the protests of his furious wife. Szeman tells her story from various points of view, first from the viewpoint of the Kommandant, then from the viewpoint of his mistress, and finally from the "official viewpoint". Another daring move is Szeman's presentation of often horrifying events without much embellishment. She depicts the situtations as a series of snapshots, one after another, quickly and relentlessly. For example, Szeman depicts the Kommandant's daughter, Ilse, repeating the vicious Jew-hating comments that she hears from her elders, each word coming out like a horrible profanity from the mouth of an innocent child. In another scene, the Kommandant implores his mistress to take his gun and help him to commit suicide. Will she pull the trigger? The effect of this staccato narrative style is similar to a punch in the stomach. It is traumatizing to contemplate constantly changing scenarios of deportations, physical and mental torture, and murder. Szeman seems to be saying that there is no way to tell such a story in a linear way. Only by being cryptic and non-linear can one begin to capture the emotional trauma of events that are not within the scope of most people's experience. Szeman is a poet, as well as a novelist, and her novel at times approaches poetry in its tremendous emotional impact. I highly recommend this book to readers who are interested in Holocaust literature that is challenging and thought-provoking.

Rating:
Summary: A disturbing read....
Review: The star rating for this book was difficult to decide on - I'd wanted to move it up to 3 1/2 stars, maybe 4 -- but the rating would have to be conditional. This book is not for everyone - the topic and the writing style are both disturbing, probably not by chance.

Sherri Szeman was my creative writing teacher some years ago - she was an excellent teacher, a demanding critic, sending things back for re-writes, as I creaked my way back from years of non-writing. I picked up a galley edition of her newest book (currently titled "Only With the Heart") at a recent bookseller's convention, and though I'm three-quarters of the way through, found it so frustrating that I decided to read her first novel, "The Kommandant's Mistress," which had gotten rave reviews.

Although the style used in both books is virtually identical - shifting without warning several times in each chapter from different time periods in the character's life (very difficult to get used to), I found that unusual style worked in this book much better than it does in her new book.

Why? It may be because this book reflects an extremely disturbing time, when the minds of a nation were (to put it mildly) confused, mired in the darkness of Adolph Hitler's leadership.

The first part of this book is written from the perspective of the Kommandant, the second from that of the mistress, who of course is not a traditional mistress by choice or definition. The last section offers two short bios of the characters which leave many questions open.

Someone called this a poorly disguised Harlequin -I would have to say, NOT! Harlequins are formula novels, light and fluffy. If you prefer your novels to have a plot neatly laid out, with a satisfying conclusion, do NOT read this book - you will be disappointed!

If you enjoy a creative writing style, and an in depth look into the lives of two ordinary (not normal) people in an exceptionally evil time, you will probably enjoy this book. The lead characters are full and complex, the story is gripping. Szeman has researched the events of the time and uses quotes from historical figures (she provides a long list of books in her Author's Notes for anyone who wants to read more about that time.

For those who have an interest in the Holocaust, this book should be on the 'must read' list.

Rating:
Summary: Harlequinized treatment of grim subject matter
Review: This is one of the best books I have read. Its structure is remarkable. Think of James Joyce and his stream of consciencousness style but in complete sentences and easy to understand. We get the interior monologues of the major characters as though they are remembering the past, jumping from memory to memory.

The book is a powerful depiction of an unreal time. The marvel of this book is that the Kommandant is not portrayed as all bad and the Mistress is not all victim or all good.

Cool language is the medium for the most distrubing events. It is the substance of what is being said that carries the power, not the use or overuse of bombastic verbage that so often writers use to show us how great their talent is. This book says more with less.

In the end it is the most haunting of books.

Rating:
Summary: Harlequinized treatment of grim subject matter
Review: This, a tale of a Nazi concentration camp commandant and his sexual subjugation of a Jewish inmate, is ultimately nothing more than a cliched romance novel masquerading as middle-brow literature. All the Harlequin cliches are here; Rachel, the Jewish inmate, is not just passably good-looking, she is, as the "official" biography at the end tells us, "a renowned beauty", and her captor is similarly "exceedingly physically attractive". Well, naturally, because there wouldn't be as much melodramatic potential if they were exceedingly non-remarkable individuals, and while one could argue that it was because of her looks that the commandant grew infatuated with her, it still seems to me a little too stock-in-trade when it comes to the stereotypes of cheesy romance novels.

Written in two first person narratives with biographical sketches at the end, the structure is jarring and provides no momentum to the plot, nor any depth to the characters; the reader is ultimately left with many pieces of the puzzle but no key as to how to put them together. Truth be told I haven't read a stylistic mishmash like this with the Holocaust as subject matter since DM Thomas' "White Hotel".

In turns cliched, clumsily written and over-wrought, I'd recommend giving this one a miss. Liliana Cavani did this first and better with her film "The Night Porter", a far more convincing and original portrayal of sexual obsession between a Nazi officer and Jewish concentration camp inmate; I'd also recommend Ka-Tzetnik's novels "House of Dolls" and "Atrocity" for a more viscerally realistic and harrowing view of sex as an instrument of survival during this insane and dark period of history.

Rating:
Summary: The Kommandant's Mistress
Review: WOW! This is an amazing book. It takes a few pages to get into Sherri Szeman's style. It is stream-of-consciousness interior monologue from the point of view of the Kommandant first and later his mistress. An amazing psychological profile of a "good" man doing his job as a Nazi in WWII. Then, in contrast, the same situation is viewed by one of his victims with whom he is obsessed. It takes your breath away. Her writing style is provocative and you just don't want to put the novel down until you find out what happens to these two people. You can tell Ms Szeman has done some research for this book either in interviews or reading or both because she gets inside the soul of the two characters. I recommend this book for anyone who likes a book that stays with them forever. It is deeply moving. You will never forget the Kommandant nor his Mistress.