Book - Searching for Schindler: A Memoir

Searching for Schindler: A Memoir
Thomas Keneally
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Australian author Keneally was awarded the 1982 Booker Prize for his novel Schindler's List. How Keneally came to write that novel about Oskar Schindler's rescue of more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust is a tale that, curiously enough, began in Beverly Hills while the author was promoting his Civil War novel, Confederates. Looking for a new briefcase, he entered a luggage shop owned by the ebullient, charismatic Leopold Poldek Pfefferberg, one of Schindler's survivors. Poldek gave Keneally copies of documents he had once assembled for a Schindler film that was never made. Nan Talese, then at Simon & Schuster, offered a $60,000 advance for a book, and Keneally and Poldek left on an international research expedition. That journey and the survivors they met form the compelling centerpiece of this moving memoir. With publication, the question arose as to whether Schindler's List was a novel or history, but Keneally had planned from the start to write what Truman Capote or his publisher had called faction. The closing chapters cover the making of Steven Spielberg's 1993 film adaptation, which won seven Academy Awards.

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I actually bought this book by mistake. Kindle and the 1-click shopping being the culprit. I figured I would eventually read this book after I read the actual Schindler's Ark/List anyway, so went ahead and read this (which I'm regretting right now... should have read the actual book first!).

This memoir details how Keneally came to write the book, Schindler's List/Ark. In a way, it was pretty dry, just a recount of things happening, places they went... but I actually found this Poldek guy very amusing.

Half way through, after the time when the actual book got published, it came to cover about the making of the movie. This part was actually more boring than the first part of the book, in terms of the legal/compensation/discussion of various things... however, interesting tidbits are sprinkled here and there, like how the actor Ralph Fiennes, in his Amon Goeth uniform had looked so much like the real deal that a woman survivor (they allowed "Schindler Jews" survivors to visit the set apparently) actually stepped back in horror when she saw him.

I think this would have been a better book AFTER having read the actual Schindler's Ark book... and not the other way around, but it was interesting nontheless.