Joe's War: My Father Decoded [Hardcover]

Annette Kobak (Author)

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Product Details

Hardcover: 464 pages
Publisher: Knopf (Mar 9 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375411844
ISBN-13: 978-0375411847
Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 15.3 x 4.2 cm
Shipping Weight: 703 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,805,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Raising his family in Britain during the Cold War, Joe Kobak was frequently in ill temper and given to oppressive silences. As she reached late middle age, his daughter, Annette, found she needed to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding him—the result is this unusual, and unusually personal, account of WWII. The story belongs equally to father and daughter, as the author forges a new intimacy with Joe and receives an accelerated dose of recent European history. A Czech living in Poland when hostilities began, Joe was a bright young man with a technical cast of mind and a tenacious memory. During the war, he smuggled people out of Poland, was strafed by German fighters during the fall of France, and relayed intercepted German radio transmissions to British code breakers. Kobak (biographer of Isabelle Eberhardt) uses her investigations into these experiences as an occasion to document one of the many tragedies of WWII—the prewar and wartime betrayal of the smaller Eastern European countries by France and Great Britain. Along the way we learn of the heroes of prewar Czechoslovakia, Masaryk and Benes, and of the deep enmity between Poland and the Ukraine. Kobak interpolates a diplomatic history of the 1930s and early 1940s with her father's adventures in Eastern Europe and her own as she retraced some of Joe's wartime travels in 2001. Part memoir, part Joe's first-person narrative, part historical account, the book violates genre boundaries—but it is precisely this lack of affectedness, couched in graceful, perceptive writing, that makes it such an engrossing and informative work. 20 photos, 2 maps.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

World War II got rolling after Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler and ended with Churchill and Roosevelt serving up Poland to Stalin. Kobak, author of a well-received biography of nineteenth-century French writer Isabelle Eberhardt, reflects on both of these history-altering events in the course of trying to understand her father's WWII experiences. Born in Czechoslovakia and reared in Poland, young Joe escaped Russian and German occupied territory in the war's early days, making his way to England to work on Russian radio intercepts. Separated from his family, Joe suffered hardships and close scrapes, but it took his daughter years to see the truth in a Jewish survivor's characterization of him as lucky. Even though Joe's story is insignificant compared to those who suffered atrocities, Kobak ably employs his history to revisit the unconscionable treatment of Czechs and Poles by the hapless and cynical Great Powers. In the process, she reminds readers of journalist Martha Gellhorn's timely admonition to "never believe governments, not any of them, not a word they say; keep an untrusting eye on what they do." Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Amazon.com: 4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Piece of World War 11 History, Oct 7 2005

By Constance Mc Goff - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Joe's War: My Father Decoded (Paperback)

I found this book fascinating and extremely readable. I was not able to put it down. I especially liked the way the author wove her father's story into the events of Hitler's attempt to take over Europe. I did not know the story of the brave Polish and Czech people and how after giving their all to the Allied cause they were ultimately "given up" to appease the Russians.

3.0 out of 5 stars Ultimately disappointing, Nov 21 2004

By Alyssa A. Lappen - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Joe's War: My Father Decoded (Hardcover)

This nonfiction story concerns the experience of the author's father during World War II in his native Poland and later as a decoding agent in the U.K. forces. In addition, the author weaves in her own travels through Ukraine and Poland, to the places that her father lived and traveled during the early war years. One learns in great detail, for example, about the British and allied betrayal of Czechoslovakia on the one hand, and of Poland, on the other.

The historical facts are interesting and of great import even now, for their relevance to parallel, current-day situations in which the world community is all-too-willing to sacrifice third parties like Israel and the Southern Sudan on the alter of promises of peace (albeit false). Clearly, the world has learned little from history.

But in the end, the author does not adequately explain her father's total silence about the war during her childhood. I kept expecting something of enormous import to happen in this book, and while it was interesting, and included a great deal of useful history, the end result was ultimately disappointing.

The biggest fault herein is the structure: the author would have better-served her purpose by detailing the precarious situation of Poles at the book's outset, and re-emphasizing it throughout, rather than explaining the point only in hindsight at its end. By then, I had all but lost patience and interest in the long, drawn-out tale, with no clear point.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews 4.0 out of 5 stars