Reviews

Abstract

To the Editors: I would like to respond to Professor Lynn Rapaport's review of my book A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait (AHR, October 2005, 1278–1279). While Rapaport finds the story of the Kalmans “fascinating,” she sees nothing good about the book itself. The research, she writes, is sloppy; the writing and translation are clumsy; it is neither scholarly nor a portrait of a “typical Jewish family” in postwar Germany. Important voices, she finds, are missing, and the book is lopsided, with half of it given to one of the four siblings, the other half to the rest. To start with the point about alleged lopsidedness: As stated throughout, the focus of my book is on the ten children born to the four siblings who survived the Holocaust. The eldest brother had five of the children; the other three siblings had the other five. Logically, the first half of the book went to the eldest brother's five children, the second half to the five children of the other three siblings. Moreover, one of the eldest brother's five children, as a company executive, was the primary informant about the family firm. Should I have condensed the life histories of the first five children so that collectively they were allotted less space than the rest? Professor Rapaport, as a sociologist herself, should recognize that this does not make sense. As it turned out, each nuclear family group is given roughly the same amount of space per child. Important voices in the family are indeed missing. But most of the time, there is not much to be gleaned from interviews with very old persons, and as for the deceased, I have not yet found a way of interviewing them via séances. The fact, moreover, that some individuals have more to say than others is only natural, and I see no reason why I should have cut their stories short.