The Ghost Tattoo

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR BEST HOLOCAUST MEMOIR For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Watchmakers, a powerful, profoundly moving Holocaust memoir from a rarely told perspective—the story of a son’s quest to understand his father, a heroic, complicated Jewish survivor—and to uncover the hidden past and desperate choices he made when the Nazis recruited him to police his own people in their Polish ghetto. Growing up, Tony Bernard knew that his father, Henry, had been in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He was familiar with the tattoo bearing his Auschwitz number—B1224—and the faint scar resulting from a suicide attempt while in a camp in Blizyn. As an Australian boy growing up on Sydney’s sunny Northern Beaches where Henry was a well-respected doctor, Tony simply accepted these facts. Only as a young man, on a trip to Poland with his father, did he begin to uncover the secrets that filled Henry with regret, anguish, and guilt. Henry’s experiences in the concentration camps were harrowing, and he survived through ingenuity, grit, and countless miracles of chance. Yet there was another, deeper story—of what happened before his deportation to the camps. In 1940, Henry was recruited into the Jewish Order Service in his Polish hometown—an organization set up by the Nazis to help maintain order among Jews. Like many other young recruits, Henry believed he would help protect his community. Instead, the ghetto police, as they became known, were forced to assist the Nazis in the subjugation and mistreatment of their own people. Faced daily with impossible choices, desperate to keep his loved ones alive, Henry was both victim and unwilling participant. The Ghost Tattoo is a haunting, emotionally resonant memoir of war and its aftermath. It is also a singular account of resistance, resilience, and hope. Henry was eventually called to Germany to testify in a trial against Nazi murderers, where his evidence proved pivotal. After decades of silence, he seized the chance to bear witness—for history, for his family, and for all those who did not survive.

The profoundly moving story of a son's quest to uncover his father's Holocaust secret.To the outside world, Henry Bernard was a hard-working and beloved family doctor on Sydney's Northern Beaches. Yet he was also a Holocaust survivor whose life was profoundly affected by the experiences of his past. He took extreme steps for his family's security, keeping a rifle near his bedroom and covering up his family's Jewish origin. He was obsessed with paying off debt - the German word for debt being the same as the word for 'guilt'. He kept his striped Auschwitz uniform with a picture of his mother in his wardrobe. These obsessions helped destroy his marriage and restricted any hope he had of conventional domestic happiness. But Henry had a bigger secret and a deeper shame about what he had done during the war. He suffered privately until he began returning to Germany and Poland to confront his past and come to terms with the deaths of his parents and of Halina, the love of his life.The Ghost Tattoo is the story of how Tony Bernard, Henry's eldest son, went on a forty-year journey with his father to solve the mystery of why Henry was the way he was, and how he finally came to understand the desperate choices Henry had made in the ghetto to try to keep himself and his family alive.

Haunting has long been a compelling element in popular culture, and has become an influential category in academic engagements with politics, economics, and aesthetics. While recent scholarship has used psychoanalysis and the Gothic as frameworks with which to study haunting, this volume seeks to situate ghosts in the cultural imagination. The chapters in Popular Ghosts are united by the impulse to theorize the cultural work that ghosts do within the trans-historical contexts that comprise our understanding of everyday life. These authors study the theoretical and aesthetic genealogies of the spectral, while also commenting on the multiple everyday spaces that this category occupies. Rather than looking to a single tradition or medium, the essays in Popular Ghosts explore film, novels, photography, television, music, social practices, and political structures from different cultures to reopen the questions that surround our haunted sense of the everyday.

The second part of history and meanings of tattoo motifs.

In the early winter, the ancient town, which looked a little depressed, was bleak with the cold wind, and a cool breeze blew, and several bright red maple leaves fell from the air, swirling along the dry and pale slate with the breeze, which was particularly bleak. The sunshine in early winter is a little shabby, shooting down from the air, bringing a little warmth to this cold winter.

Poetry. "There is great wit and a sly, honed gravitas in these poems. Florence Weinberger wrestles the ineluctable irony at work in every aspect of our lives, and wins; each poem provides a practical wisdom, and her range is amazing, from Opera, philosophy, and cosmology to family memoir, movie stars, and knuckle cracking. It takes deep experience, great human insight, and a unique intelligence to make poems this fresh, compelling, and yet accessible at street level. On top of all of this, Weinberger's craft is exceptional and delightful, and helps us understand the small and large conundrums of living. This is work of the first order. I love every poem in here--the deep humanity of it all, the keen sense of irony, yet the luminous ability to cherish so much."--Christopher Buckley "With her stunning fifth collection of poetry, GHOST TATTOO, Florence Weinberger will now be known not only as 'a longtime pillar' of Los Angeles poetry but as its newly appointed oracle as well. These illuminating and breathtaking poems reveal those sometimes visible and at time invisible markings left by experience--on our souls, our imaginations and even our bodies. Whether writing the poems of a family album (including a superb cycle of elegies for her mother) or considering the relationship of art to the individual reality/sensibility of a painter or a poet...or when reflecting upon the loss of a beloved and the subsequent electricity of late love, Florence Weinberger always surprises us by taking the unexpected poetic path. This is a book that belongs at your bedside, for those moments the night grows far too long and far too lonely."--David St. John "Florence Weinberger's GHOST TATTOO is a wondrous collection! It is the story of one person accepting and explaining the changing exigencies of life's variation, a life understood through the arts: movies, paintings, music, a grandson's ceramic, and of course poetry. Even so, it is a life that art usually falls short to inform properly, 'leaving gaps the size of history.' Weinberger generously invites us into this wisdom, and here and there, a line of poetry as urgent and insightful and stunning as any being written."--David Oliveira

176 pages of Yokai. A class of supernatural entities and spirits in Japanese folklore. The word yōkai is composed of the kanji for "attractive; calamity" and "apparition; mystery; suspicious." Yōkai are also referred to as ayakashi, mononoke or mamono. Yokai are not literally demons in the Western sense of the word, but are instead spirits and entities, whose behavior can range from malevolent or mischievous to friendly, fortuitous, or helpful to humans.

When youth and maturity are combined, it is difficult to tell an intuitive feeling. It may be that her tender face is born with a little cuteness, or a little charm caused by a casual glance at her smart eyes. But now, it seems to be the touch of her lips, a little arrogance