Rumors and Stones: A Journey

In 1941, German troops occupying the Polish town of Kolno machine-gunned into ditches its remaining 2000 Jewish inhabitants. In this poignant narrative, Karlin, an American novelist and former helicopter gunner in Vietnam, reenacts his 1993 visit to Kolno, where his mother (who died in 1991) had lived prior to emigrating to the U.S. in her youth; his father, a boxer, died when he was five, leaving the family to struggle in Manhattan and White Plains, N.Y. For Karlin, the Germans' extermination of Kolno's Jewish community fused in his mind with the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which U.S. soldiers systematically raped, mutilated and machine-gunned into ditches 500 Vietnamese villagers. Novelistic flashbacks to the saga of Karlin's grandparents and their family in Poland and America are interwoven with history and sharp reportage as he visits the sites of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Treblinka extermination camp; in the camp, Jewish prisoners staged a revolt, killed guards, blew up the gas chambers and escaped to the forest. This is a haunting meditation on human courage and the erosion of morality by war. (Oct.)