Gabis, Rita. A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet: My Grandfather's SS Past, My Jewish Family, a Search for the Truth. Bloomsbury USA. Sept. 2015.464p. illus. maps. notes, bibliog. ISBN 9781632862617. $28; ebk. ISBN 9781620401293. Gabis (The Wild Field) has a personal connection to the Holocaust: her Lithuanian grandfather, a Nazi collaborator, may have participated in war crimes. This revelation is especially troubling for Gabis as her other grandparents were Ashkenazi Jews. The au-thor's memoir is a journey of discovery, taking her from interviews with Lithuanian relatives-many of whom seek to forget the past-to the halls of the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi War Crimes division, the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and as far as Lithuanja and Jerusalem. Along the way, Gabis con-fronts not only her family's demons but many of her own, including memories of abuse by a male relative and the struggle to reconcile the grandfather she knew with his Nazi collaboration. The book features an impressive amount of archivai research, and the author often tries to engage the ethical issues that sit at the heart of the Shoah. Yet her narrative seems more about the travails of her experience rather than the historical events she inves-tigates. VERDICT There are few dramatic revelations for specialists, and generai readers may have trouble keeping track of the myriad characters. However, this thoughtful account is recommended for generai audiences.
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