Linda Kinstler's (Rhetoric PhD Candidate) new book Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, published by Public Affairs, has received national and international praise since it's publication in the US this August. Read select reviews below:
The Guardian: Come to This Court and Cry by Linda Kinstler review – when Holocaust memories fade
In March 1965, the festering corpse of 64-year-old Herberts Cukurs was discovered stuffed into a trunk in a seaside bungalow in Montevideo, Uruguay. During the 1930s, Cukurs’ exploits as a dashing aviator had made him one of the most celebrated men in Latvia. Under the Nazi occupation, he found a new calling as a prominent member of the Arajs Kommando, the SS-affiliated killing unit responsible for the burning of the Riga ghetto and the massacre of around 25,000 Jews in Rumbula forest, among other barbarities. Read the full review.
The Wall Street Journal: ‘Come to This Court and Cry’ Review: A Ghost in the Family
Linda Kinstler was born in California, in 1991, to an ethnic Latvian father and a Jewish mother whose roots are in Ukraine. Her parents had emigrated to the U.S. from Soviet Latvia in 1988. Growing up, she’d been told that her paternal grandfather had “disappeared” after World War II. Since there were no photographs of him at home, and he’d rarely come up in conversation, Ms. Kinstler sensed that something dark was keeping the family’s lips sealed. She also knew that her father was quietly obsessed with finding out what had happened to his father. One day, anguished by his inability to uncover anything, he called Ms. Kinstler to say: “You’re a journalist. Why don’t you find out?” Read the full review.
Literary Hub: What You Should Read Next: Best Reviewed Books of the Week
“Intelligent and thoughtful … What gives Kinstler’s story its charge is not so much the horrific saga of the Arājs Kommando, or the relatively unknown Israeli operation to take the law into their own hands, but the almost Kafkaesque quality of Latvian public memory … Read the list here.