Years of Estrangement

Part of Northwestern's Jewish Lives series, Years of Estrangement binds two very different memoirs together in one beautiful book. These are not memoirs of the Holocaust per se, but rather of other years and other places overshadowed by it. In ""Under the Nazi Regime,"" Leyens, 98, describes in detail the havoc wreaked upon his family and their business in the years leading up to Kristallnacht. He continues to grapple with the looming question of how his neighbors could have given their allegiance to Hitler and turned their backs on the Jews who fought alongside them in WWI. In ""Memoirs of an Unknown Actress,"" Andor, who died in New York City in 1991 at 88 (her memoir was completed in 1989), chooses to forgo painful descriptions for the most part and focuses instead on her life as an actress before Hitler came to power and, later, as a struggling refugee in France, Spain, Czechoslovakia and, finally, the United States. Reading their works is like sitting over a glass of hot tea while listening to people you care about trying to remember, reconstruct and understand. An important work, Years of Estrangement is also intimate and quietly strong. Leyens' indignation and confusion and Andor's sweet optimism (she writes of her many friends, ""All my life, I have had the best of luck with human beings"") provide a window into the souls of those who survived the Holocaust. (Dec.)