My Reconstructed Life

By Eugen Schoenfeld

Book Overview

This book is a socio-autobiography of a young man, born in a Jewish town at the foot-hills of the Carpathian Mountains in 1925 to a devout Jewish family, and his journey through the Holocaust toward academia in the United States. This new edition also follows his story into retirement. This book is the revelation and personal evolution of a boy born and steeped in orthodoxy who, while retaining the essence of the values into which he inducted, sought at the same time to re-interpret his original values and ideals. He takes this orthodox-particularism and seeks to reconstruct it to become a universalist view of mankind. This book is also a description of his effort to reconstruct his life which had been destroyed by Hitler's effort to make the world "Jew free." In the camps, he lost most of his family upon which the foundation of his early life was built. After the war, finding himself alone, he had to revise his plans for the future and was forced to find his way alone, in another world and another way of life. He seeks to overcome obstacles and rebuild his life, while also finding a niche for himself in a new, post-Holocaust world. Eugen Schoenfeld, shares with his readers the hardships he endured both in the camps and after liberation; of hunger and loneliness and separation from his father living behind the Iron Curtain. He invites his readers to share the various choices he had to make, to understand the reasons for his decisions, in the process of re-constructing his life. He explores the paths he had to follow in order to achieve his goal of understanding, finding the answers to the question he asked his father on the first day in Aushwitz-Birkenau: "How is possible that now, in the midst of the twentieth century, after all the great achievements in philosophy, psychology, and theology, man is still inhumane?" This book is his search for a way through which human beings can reconstruct themselves, can cease living merely as human beings and evolving into humane beings.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 151865746X
• ISBN13: 9781518657467
• Release Date: October 2015
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 316 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Review of "My Reconstructed Life"

This is more than a story of a Holocaust survivor, it is a story of one man's personal trimuph. In this brutally honest and open autobiography the author decribes his peaceful childhood that was shattered by the Holocaust. Although a portion of the book describes his life, and death of most of his family, during the Holocaust, the second half of the book is a psychological drauma of how this young man rebuilds his life against more improbable odds. After he survives near certain death in the concentration camps his losses continue to mount. The author brings the reader into his psyche when he decribes pivitol decisions: whether to kill his abusive concentration camp guard when given the opportunity, to live with his father after the war or seek out an education, or to marry into wealth but loose control over his destiny. Although I would recommend this book to any person interested in Holocaust history or Jewish Studies, I think my recommendation goes beyound that limited group. This is a book that most mature high school students should read but I can recommend it to any adult who wants to know how one young man rebuilt his life after loosing everything, then loosing more.

Rethinking identity in light of adversity...

I was fortunate enough to get a prerelease copy of this book before it hit the streets. Some people wanted to know what I thought about it because I have an interest in identity issues. I really liked it. It's a very honest treatment given the series of events that the author describes. The author contrasts different times of his life in relation to the atrocities that occurred in Hitlerite Germany. I don't think that you have to have a pronounced interest in Judaism to appreciate the depth of pain and suffering that happened during this time in history or to this man in particular. Though, if you do or if you're in interested in human rights issues, there's an additional benefit associated with it. The net result is that this book gives a very real human face to a very real human tragedy that now seems foreign to most. Though the barbarism of the Nazis is unsettling at times, it's worth the read. The truth often hurts. Maybe it should because that way you can learn from it. Good stuff.