Review
[Herschel Grynszpan] faced what his biographer Jonathan Kirsch perceptively calls the 'existential threat of statelessness.' Kirsch has a dramatic story, and he tells it well. --Timothy Snyder"
In his well-crafted study Jonathan Kirsch manages to put some meat on the skinny frame of his protagonist and also to put a human face on his victim. In so doing, Kirsch has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Kristallnacht. --David Clay Large"
On Nov. 7, 1938, a troubled Jewish teenager walked into an embassy in Paris, got in to see a low-level Nazi attache and shot him dead a killing that gave Hitler a pretext for the savage, anti-Semitic orgy of Kristallnacht. --Scott Martelle"
In his well-crafted study... Jonathan Kirsch manages to put some meat on the skinny frame of his protagonist and also to put a human face on his victim. In so doing, Kirsch has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Kristallnacht. --David Clay Large
[An] excellent account...Reading this excellent, thought-provoking biography, one is all too easily reminded of Camus's 1942 novel, The Stranger. --Philip Kerr
Kirsch's investigation of its international history invites us to chart the troubling boundaries of responsibility for atrocity. --Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
No novelist could invent a story with as many twists of history and character as the one Jonathan Kirsch tells about Herschel Grynszpan...The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan illuminates the countless short and tragic lives of eastern European Jews running for shelter in the terrible days leading up to World War II. --Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator and Dreaming in French
With a storyteller's touch and a lawyer's insight, Kirsch elevates this tragic tale and makes it read like a legal and moral thriller. --Thane Rosenbaum, author of Payback: The Case for Revenge and The Myth of Moral Justice
Kirsch expertly picks through the murky details to shed new light on the historical significance. A compelling study.
Herschel Grynszpan wanted nothing more than to be remembered for his rash, heroic actions. In Kirsch, he has finally found an objective, yet passionate, chronicler. --Ronald C. Rosbottom, professor of French and European studies, Amherst College
With page-turning virtuosity, Jonathan Kirsch uncovers a tantalizing story and makes it real and compulsively readable: What were the events that set in motion one of the true Holocaust mysteries--the assassination that gave the Nazis the excuse to begin their violent campaign toward extermination of Europe's Jews? With a storyteller's touch and a lawyer's insight, Kirsch elevates this tragic tale and makes it read like a legal and moral thriller. --Thane Rosenbaum, author of Payback: The Case for Revenge and The Myth of Moral Justice
About the Author
Jonathan Kirsch is the author of the best-selling The Harlot by the Side of the Road and A History of the End of the World, the book editor of the Jewish Journal, and a longtime contributor of book reviews to the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
