Listening to Chopin While Fighting Nazis

This is an odd, unstable hybrid — a whimsical, angel-and-crow-populated wartime fable bolted onto a hard-nosed memoir of documentary reckoning — and the seam between them is exactly where the book earns its keep. The novella half never quite decides whether it's magical realism or catechism-class comedy (Baby Jesus sassing his mother, crow-poop slapstick), but the memoir half is genuinely substantive. Charns isn't writing nostalgia; he's conducting an inquest into his own family mythology, and he says so plainly: "Did my family lie to me about our Polish history?" The pivot from I Survived Hitler's Hell to the caption blaming "the rabbis and their rich coreligionists" is a gut-punch reveal handled with restraint — he lets the primary source indict itself. Then the discovery of In the Clutches of the Jews, apparently authored under his aunt's name with his grandfather's antisemitic postscript, escalates the stakes without melodrama. The through-line — a lawyer trained to distrust official lies (his FBI/Supreme Court files work, later published as Cloak and Gavel) turning that same forensic skepticism on his own bloodline — gives the book a real argument: inherited heroism narratives deserve the same scrutiny as government cover-ups. That's a takeaway a reader can use, not just admire. The self-implicating honesty ("I'm ashamed of myself" re: the courtroom Nazi comparison) keeps the narrator credible rather than self-mythologizing.