My friend Mark Klempner, author of The Heart Has Reasons, the award-winning book profiling Dutch Righteous Gentiles, will be touring the east coast from April 15-22nd to promote the book. He’ll be appearing both in New York and Washington, DC. Among other places, he’ll be at Riverside Church, the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Here’s the book tour schedule. I’ve written more about the book here. This is a worthy enterprise by someone who is a real mensch. I hope if you live in or near either of these places you’ll make your best effort to meet Mark and buy his book.
“A book to restore one’s faith in the possibility of human goodness.”
—Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People
This is high praise indeed from a Pulitzer-Prize winner:
“In these pages you will meet profound, uplifting people whose iron devotion to human caring compelled them to risk everything to shelter, hide, and save the vulnerable. You will not stop thinking about them after you finish reading, for Mark Klempner gracefully, hauntingly, invites the most intimate reflection on the moral struggles echoing from the Holocaust into the troubled present.”
—David K. Shipler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land
What I find most interesting about Mark’s book is that he probes the social, political and ethical imperatives that motivated his subjects to rescue Jews. The heroes he profiles here certainly did not see their acts as heroic. But they performed those acts because they were informed by an ethical imperative to do so. What Mark does is provide a political and moral underpinning to his subjects. This approach is rare or possibly even unique in the history of Holocaust rescue literature.
