Let’s Make Things Better: Finding Hope in the Darkest Days

Lev, an 80-something influencer whose TikTok account pushes back against Holocaust denialism, debuts with a moving if scattershot account of rebuilding his life after WWII. Born in a small Czechoslovakian village, Lev recalls an idyllic childhood upended by the Nazis’ 1938 invasion, which drove the family to Prague before they were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1941 (only he and his mother survived). He narrates his struggle in tender, unsparing detail: scrambling for food scraps; enduring constant cold and hunger; celebrating such small joys as befriending and falling “in love” with a little girl with whom he shared a room before she was “sent east.” The camp was liberated when Lev was 10, though more pain followed as his mother sank into depression, refusing to discuss the war or the deaths of more than two dozen relatives (“I felt that my mother depressed, suppressed, and oppressed me. I wish I had been able... to break through her anger”). Such candid, gutting moments are the book’s greatest strength; less effective are chapters covering his first and second marriages, as well as rote self-help suggestions that can feel like an afterthought. Flaws aside, it’s a valuable account of the Shoah at a moment of rising antisemitism. (Nov.)