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Title: Searching for Fritzi by Carol Bergman ISBN: 0-9673134-0-6 Publisher: Mediacs Pub. Date: January, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: A gripping and memorable read
Comment: A gripping and memorable read. The relationship between the three generation of women is touchingly and honestly depicted.

Rating: 4
Summary: A touching account of one family's post-holocaust experienc
Comment: The offspring of holocaust survivors also have experiences which, as told in "Searching for Fritzi", can be quite traumatic. Narrated almost like a travel story, "..Fritzi" contains sufficient suspense and revelations to capture one's interest for non-stop reaading from beginning to end.

It's a truly touching account of a family's effort to re-construct their own genesis by returning to the past, and uncovering details about the family's survival during the dark days of Fascism. One gets the feeling, when reading "Fritzi" that the act of writing the story had a cathartic effect on the family members, an emotion which can be shared by anyone whose genesis involves forced dispersal far away from one's original homeland.

Rating: 5
Summary: The Holocaust Beyond its Survivors
Comment: Review of Searching for Fritzi, by Carol Bergman.

Searching for Fritzi by Carol Bergman is a deeply moving story, and one very necessary to tell now. The cover of the book shows three people standing at the gate of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Glancing at the cover on picking the book up, one does not realize who those three people are. Only after the end, after closing the book and looking again at the image of the three silhouettes under the slogan, Arbeit Macht Frei, does the second major shock of the narrative hit you. (Saying more here would ruin the impact.) This kind of story can easily be overtold, overwritten; but no easy bathos here. Bergman shows great control throughout. I've often thought that the narrative of a full story should be a bracket between the first word and the last; whether intended it or not, such an effect works perfectly here: "My... home." Bergman tells us that the story of this book is a significant portion of her daily world. In fact, the narrative moves back and forth from the Fritzi story to Bergman's own Vienna story, constantly creating a segue from Fritzi the ice skater of the past to Bergman in the present. There are many more moments of shocking clarity. Images and notions that had always been there, never recognized, flat in meaning on a flat daily landscape, turn into the most devastating of realities once their history is understood. Like Bergman labelling all exterminations, from the death squads to the camps, by their right names: murder. Because even extermination has become an easy word, found in the yellow pages of most phone books; you won't find "murder" as a listing there. Like the picture of Bergman's mother standing on her own father's grave--or rather standing there because some bureaucrat of a groundskeeper has said it's the grave--how can one ever know. Just as Bergman portrays the cleanliness of that Germanic world, the surface without in effect its own history, hidden under order and polished self-presentation: the tourist sees nothing, or maybe the tourist should in fact see nothing--the definition of tourism, pretty pretty pretty. As important is Bergman's sense at the end that yes, that monstrous past is all still there, one must see it, know it has been, but on many real daily levels leave it behind--let it inform the present but not be the present. There's that wonderful line of George Eliot's, If we could hear the sound of each blade of grass growing, surely we would go mad. And yet we have to know that grass does grow, with love, water and pesticides, it's not just all perfect lawns for suburbs and golf courses. Searching for Fritzi does that--it demands that one look at the stuff below the historical surface, even the surface of the bright and happy and privileged present--we are here to look at it; the others passed through the Arbeit Macht Frei arch--and does so with immense compassion.