LA VIE MOUVEMENTÉE DE MICHAEL K / THE MANY LIVES OF MICHAL K. – CARNOY

Information

Author:

Martin Carnoy

Date:

Bouquins
August 2023

Author:

Additional Info

THE MANY LIVES OF MICHAL K.

Rights Holder: Bouquins
Original Language: French

An epic that only the collective memory of World War II could create. Martin Carnoy follows in the tradition of Imre Kertesz and Art Spiegelman. — Laurent Binet, international bestselling author of HHhH.

In the closing days of August 1939, fourteen-year-old Michał Klein boards an eastbound train with his parents and sister, leaving their comfortable lives in Kalisz, Poland to avoid the coming conflict with Germany. Thus begins the journey of one Jewish teenager, who lives first with his aunt and uncle in Lublin and is eventually forced to survive the murderous German occupation of his Polish homeland. He is later hidden with his sister on a peasant’s farm near Lublin, then when the Nazi extermination of Jews begins in earnest, he joins Jewish partisans in the Polish forests, fighting the Nazis and protecting other Jews.

Michał gradually becomes a hardened killer, seeking retribution to avenge the annihilation of his people. Along the way he falls in love with a leader in the socialist wing of the Polish Resistance, and this love affair shapes the rest of his life. Michal vows to settle scores with former Nazis and Polish collaborators as he searches for his sister in the chaos of the postwar migrations. His journey takes him through the government halls of the New Poland, then to DP camps in Germany, and finally, to Mexico and the United States.

The Many Lives of Michał K is the under-told story of survival, self-empowerment, and armed Jewish resistance in the margins of the War—of family, young love, religious and national identity, and, in the aftermath of Soviet liberation, of the intrigue of Cold War-war politics, emigration to the New World, and the pursuit of revenge.

Martin Carnoy is a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. He is a labor economist with a special interest in the political economy of the educational system.

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