The Seamstress (Sara Tuvel Bernstein, published posthumously in 1997)

Holocaust memoir.

Unusual – this was a Romanian Jewish woman who lived through shortages and mistreatment in her home village and in Bucharest and Budapest (where she in fact worked as a seamstress) before being sent to labor camps and concentration camps and barely surviving.

The writing style is odd – structured as exact narratives and events over the years. The book probably was published only because Edgar Bronfman became interested. But in the end the style and the sincerity are the book’s strengths and it’s well worth reading. The Holocaust stories are just beyond belief.

A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway, 1929)

This tells the story of an American serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in WW I. He falls in love with an English nurse; she attends him following an injury and they fall in love.

He returns to the front, but the Germans overwhelm the Italians and the protagonist eventually deserts as he figures out that scapegoats are being sought. Finds the nurse, and they cross the border into Switzerland.

I liked it, but not nearly as much as For Whom The Bell Tolls.