Adam's Recommendations

Well it's non-fiction next month and these are my two recommendations:

1. We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families - Philip Gourevitch.

This was the winner of the Guardian First Book award in the late 90s and is a journalistic account of the Rwandan Genocide. The genocide is one of the most shocking atrocities in recent history but compared to other genocides such as the Holocaust little is known about it. Gourevitch examines and explains the genocide through harrowing individual stories - both perpetrators and survivors and in fact the film Hotel Rwanda was based on one of the chapters in this book. I'll admit this is not going to be a cheerful read but it is also seems shameful that so many of us know so little about such a shocking event.

2. Rodinsky's Room - Rachel Lichenstein and Iain Sinclair

A fascinating book. David Rodinsky, caretaker of an old synagogue in Princelet Street near Brick Lane disappeared in the 1960s. Although the synagogue fell into dilapidation his room was left undisturbed for 20 years until Rachel Lichenstein, a Jewish artist happened upon it. The room was full of writings, annotated books, maps, gramophone records and clothes. Lichenstein, whose grandparents had fled from Poland in the 1930s started to try and piece together the shadowy figure that was David Rodinsky, a journey that takes her from the east end of London, to Poland and to Israel. She discovers that his world was that of Eastern Jewry, cabbalistic speculation, an obsession with language as code and terrible loss. This is a book about both the experience of Eastern European Jewry in the east end of London and Lichenstein's own search for her roots and Jewish identity. Weaved into this, in alternative chapters, the London based author Iain Sinclair meditates both on Lichenstein's quest to discover the "lost" David Rodinsky but also Rodinsky's Whitechapel and its immigrant past and present.

Adam R