Book Review: The treasure of Mr. Isakowitz

I have met Jews from Sweden, but never read a book written by a Swedish author about Jews and Shoa. Danny Wattin's book offered me the occasion to correct this omission. 

Maybe the story as such - three Jewish men: grandfather, son and grandson are going to Poland from Sweden to find the whereabouts of a tresure hidden before the war by the grand-grandfather - I fell in love with the writing style. It is a memoir inspired by personal stories, rebuilding fragments of stories during the war, based on stories of relatives and the own research of the author. The style is succint, suple, easy, not-pathetic and (self)ironic. It is the writing of a new generation of post-Shoah writers, quite far away of the events to approach the stories from a non-engaged angle but equally interested as the previous generations to tell the stories and recover the old histories. 

It results an approach that it is not superficial, but different. It remains the interest for the truth and the revenge of memory, but the scale of the voice differs. I am really curious about discovering more authors from this generation and, who knows, maybe some more histories about Swedish Jews too. 

Exercises of style

A couple of things about my reading choices - all of them are starting with a negation: I do not usually read history novels (it is easier for me to understand history through pure historical and qualified researches, and even less the books with religious subjects. Also, I think twice before starting to read a Nobel prize in literature writer. When I see in the big libraries the rows with books and smiling pictures with big announcements: "The ... Nobel Prize Winner", I go to another section. (So, no Le Clezio for the moment). In the case of Lagerkvist's case I found the book accidentally on a shelf in a friend's library, opened and read a couple of paragraphs. Very good and even brilliant descriptions which encouraged me to read further. But I missed the plot, the interpretation and the narrative. It is nothing complicate, but simply haven't seen the intelligence of the writing, other than a certain religious interpretation. Which I could appreciate strictly from the literary quality of the words.