Jacob's Courage is a tender coming of age love story of two young adults living in Salzburg at the time when the Nazi war machine enters Austria. This historical novel presents accurate scenes and situations of Jews in ghettos and concentration camps, with particular attention to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. It explores the dazzling beauty of passionate love and enduring bravery in a lurid world where the innocent are brutally murdered.
My hope is to educate readers about the terrors of genocide, by describing the Holocaust through the eyes of young lovers. Since many young people today know little about the Holocaust, I selected that age for my central characters. In a time when anti-Semitism is rising and Holocaust denial is proffered via the Internet, I wanted to show the reader, with remarkable clarity, how it felt to be incarcerated for the crime of being a Jew.
Holocaust books explore how humans behaved during the most brutal and horrendous genocide in history. We are complex beings. There is a great deal more to us than the ubiquitous battleground of good versus evil. We are not one or the other, but both. We are attractive and hideous, comforting and horrifying, vicious and compassionate; we worship and we loathe. We are not clouded by delusions of morality, but governed by them. I wanted the reader to experience life as a person ostracized because of the way they praise God. I wanted to challenge the concept of depersonalization based upon religious or ethnic origin. The reader should learn to value the differences among us, rather than fear them.
While the Holocaust is incredibly frightening, "Jacob's Courage" is also a passionate love story, filled with romance and endless devotion. And, "Jacob's Courage" is a story of faith and courage. The Holocaust represents the worst example of depravity and malevolence. At the same time, deep within the darkness of the Shoah (Holocaust) Jews lived, loved, worshipped and fought to survive. There, in the worst hell on earth, we find courage, faith and profound love - the elements of life and character that we worship and crave. The "Jacob's Courage" reader should come away from the book with a better understanding of how easily blind hatred can turn into violence and murder. Hopefully, this exploration of darkness will lead the reader to examine his or her own values and principles, enlightening the soul and reducing the chance of a future holocaust.
My hope is to educate readers about the terrors of genocide, by describing the Holocaust through the eyes of young lovers. Since many young people today know little about the Holocaust, I selected that age for my central characters. In a time when anti-Semitism is rising and Holocaust denial is proffered via the Internet, I wanted to show the reader, with remarkable clarity, how it felt to be incarcerated for the crime of being a Jew.
Holocaust books explore how humans behaved during the most brutal and horrendous genocide in history. We are complex beings. There is a great deal more to us than the ubiquitous battleground of good versus evil. We are not one or the other, but both. We are attractive and hideous, comforting and horrifying, vicious and compassionate; we worship and we loathe. We are not clouded by delusions of morality, but governed by them. I wanted the reader to experience life as a person ostracized because of the way they praise God. I wanted to challenge the concept of depersonalization based upon religious or ethnic origin. The reader should learn to value the differences among us, rather than fear them.
While the Holocaust is incredibly frightening, "Jacob's Courage" is also a passionate love story, filled with romance and endless devotion. And, "Jacob's Courage" is a story of faith and courage. The Holocaust represents the worst example of depravity and malevolence. At the same time, deep within the darkness of the Shoah (Holocaust) Jews lived, loved, worshipped and fought to survive. There, in the worst hell on earth, we find courage, faith and profound love - the elements of life and character that we worship and crave. The "Jacob's Courage" reader should come away from the book with a better understanding of how easily blind hatred can turn into violence and murder. Hopefully, this exploration of darkness will lead the reader to examine his or her own values and principles, enlightening the soul and reducing the chance of a future holocaust.
Charles S. Weinblatt
Author, Jacob's Courage
http://jacobscourage.wordpress.com/
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