Mala’s Cat
Mala Kacenberg Michael Joseph £14.99
Rating: 
Mala Kacenberg was 14 when she hid in a Polish wood during World War II. She is small and slender for her age. ‘If you survive, you will have a very interesting story to tell,’ they said after hearing of her experiences.
She survived despite extraordinary odds. This is her story.
It’s an account of astounding courage and resourcefulness, of unimaginable loss and an unshakeable will to live so that she might bear witness.
Mala Kacenberg is a brave woman who fought against extraordinary odds to survive the Second World War.
It begins in the town of Tarnogród, where Mala’s happy childhood was cut short by the outbreak of war when she was just 12. Her blonde hair, fair complexion, and blue eyes made her a Christian, even though she is Jewish.
One day in 1942 she’d been begging for food in nearby villages, and when she returned to the ghetto, found that everyone had been rounded up. Balla’s sister left a note warning her to not join the crowd in the market.
Mala would never again see any of her immediate family, and later learned they’d been put in wooden shacks and burned alive. Mala was now alone and her only companion was the cat she had known since childhood.
She named the cat Malach, meaning ‘angel’ in Hebrew, and twice Malach saved her life, first clawing a German soldier’s face and, later, alerting her to the need to hide by refusing to leave a ditch as soldiers approached.
Mala wrote that Mala was not able to process much of the horrors she witnessed. ‘For what normal person could absorb what was happening then?’
Finally, she took on a Christian name and joined a convoy sent by Polish workers to Germany. As a waitress, she was hidden in plain view and saw the Third Reich fall from within.
Malach disappeared around the time she was to marry and moved on with a new life in London.
‘Anyone who survived the Holocaust survived with miracles,’ she writes.
Magical though the cat of this unsentimental, profoundly moving book’s title appears – and at points I did wonder if it was more symbolic talisman than actual feline – it plays only a minor role, and the real miracle here is the vitality of Kacenberg’s faith and determination.
No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy
Mark Hodkinson Canongate £16.99
Rating:
Mark Hodkinson, a member of an upper-class family was born in Rochdale during the 1960s.
His future was mapped out, an assumed path through a pointless education, leaving secondary-modern school to take up his dad’s trade and become an electrician.
Nearly fifty years later, he still runs a publishing company and is an author.
It is easy to read Mark Hodkinson’s autobiography and realize that there is no better way of social mobility than books. He was able to use them as a drug.
He says that one thing changed his path. It wasn’t parental ambition nor an encouraging teacher that boosted his career: books were the key to his success.
The pages of a novel were where he discovered another world. He found a way of thinking that was different through stories, tales and words.
To read this memoir, you will realize there is no better tool than a book to promote social mobility.
Which is why J. K. Rowling deserves society’s eternal gratitude: no one has encouraged more children to read than her. Because of her, she is responsible for much more growth and development that any government program.
The reward for authors like her is that, if they get kids to read, then one day they will write books as delightful as this one.
For Hodkinson’s story of a life in thrall to books is a delight.
In the 70s, reading was a rare activity in America. He vividly recalls the era when only three channels were available and the existence of telephone boxes.
Hodkinson used to be in a punk group at school. He couldn’t play the guitar, he just made what he calls ‘manicured noises’.
However, despite their lack of obvious talent, they recorded an album within just two weeks. By album, he refers to a cassette that they made in one of their bedrooms.
A lovely scene shows Hodkinson in 1976, not looking up local girls at Rochdale swimming pools but instead scouring secondhand bookshops.
His hero, Holden Caulfield (the protagonist in The Catcher In The Rye), was born long before Harry Potter. He believed J. D. Salinger wrote it for him, as he did with so many others. His observations were so unique and personal, he had to have done.
As Hodkinson so astutely notes, that is what books can do: not just alter a reader’s world view, but change their life. His life was changed by them.
Jim White