Take Your Brother by the Hand

Rating:
Summary: A Personal Memoir of Universal Appeal
Review: What makes a personal memoir interesting to a wide readership beyond one's immediate family? When it has a great story to tell, and that story is told not only with clarity but with honesty, compassion and wise insight into the human condition. Not only does "Take Your Brother By The Hand" meet these disciplines but gives as well a deeply felt experience which helps us better understand historic events of a century just ended.

Joachim Oppenheimer's account of his early boyhood in Germany, emigration to New York in flight from the Nazis with his parents when he was ten, US military service in the Pacific during World War II and a post-war festering hatred for the Germans strongly establishes his anxieties about a return to Germany in 1990. His story of that visit is a splendid sharing of transcendence over old wounds, triumph over bigotry and spiritual healing.

As a non-Jew, I value the book for giving me greater, deeper understanding of Jewish persecution under the Nazis and expanded knowledge of Jewish traditions, ritual and custom. Never polemical, always fair, Oppenheimer's book is a generous and gracious contribution toward the One World, one People of God we all seek.