Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Mischling
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1978
WEBSITE:
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.leeboudreauxbooks.com/books/mischling-akonar.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2008060263
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2008060263
HEADING: Konar, Affinity
000 00371cz a2200133n 450
001 7644011
005 20080903100641.0
008 080903n| acannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2008060263
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC
053 _0 |a PS3611.O5844
100 1_ |a Konar, Affinity
670 __ |a Konar, Affinity. The illustrated version of things, 2009: |b ECIP t.p. (Affinity Konar)
953 __ |a lh03
PERSONAL
Born 1978.
EDUCATION:San Francisco State University, B.A.; Columbia University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Novelist.
AWARDS:New York Times Notable Book, Amazon Best Book of the Year, Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, Indie Next Pick, Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, Flavorwire Best Book of the Year, Elle Best Book of the Year, all for Mischling.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
The Illustrated Version of Things
Born in 1978, Affinity Konar is a writer of contemporary fiction. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from San Francisco State University and an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University. Her first novel, the 2009 The Illustrated Version of Things, features an unnamed narrator, a young woman who was raised in foster homes and hopes to reconnect with her father and half-brother Miguel. Meanwhile, she is desperately trying to find her mother. Taken from their addict mother, Miguel was placed with a nice family, while the narrator was first institutionalized and then placed with her dotty grandmother. As her behavior becomes more erratic, she embarrasses those around her. What she perceives as her last chance is to voluntarily incarcerate herself in the jail she believes her mother is in. According to a writer in Publishers Weekly, “Konar’s daffy coming-of-age novel isn’t entirely convincing, but the moments of bold, vivid prose show promise.”
Mischling
Named to many Best-Book-of-the-Year lists, Konar’s 2016 novel Mischling has garnered much praise. The story concerns twelve-year-old Polish Jewish twins Pearl and Stasha Zamorski, who are sent to Auschwitz in 1944. As identical twins are forced to participate in Josef Mengele’s Zoo, horrific experimentation affords them both privileges and pain in the form of injections of a hallucinogenic substance. The girls comfort each other through a secret language and role-playing games, as they are determined to survive.
When Pearl disappears, Stasha hopes she is still alive somewhere. Soon the camp is liberated by the Soviet Army, and Stasha and Feliks, a boy who lost his twin brother, venture through the devastation of Poland, facing starvation and cold. The book’s title is a pejorative Nazi German word for “mixed blood,” referring to the girls who do not look Jewish and have blond hair. In a review for the Dallas News, Steven G. Kellman commented: “Konar employs anticipatory retrospection to provide a larger picture than either Pearl or Stasha can see at the time,” and added, “the aesthetic achievement of Mischling cannot redeem the world after Auschwitz. It merely illuminates it, woefully, brilliantly.”
This is an “unforgettable sojourn of the spirit,” according to Booklist contributor Bryce Christensen, who added, “Unfolding out of Stasha’s anguished psyche, Konar’s compelling narrative conveys a surviving twin’s intense grief.” A Publishers Weekly writer observed: “Konar makes every sentence count; it’s to her credit that the girls never come across as simply victims.” Edward B. Cone commented in Library Journal that the book is recommended for deepening our understanding of the Holocaust and for its “stunningly original approach to a subject that would be too awful to read about if rendered in straightforward prose.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2016, Bryce Christensen, review of Mischling, p. 27.
Library Journal, August 1, 2016, Edward B. Cone, review of Mischling, p. 82.
Publishers Weekly, January 26, 2009, review of The Illustrated Version of Things, p. 97; June 6, 2016, review of Mischling, p. 60.
ONLINE
Dallas News Online, http://www.dallasnews.com/ (September 1, 2016), Steven G. Kellman, review of Mischling.
Lee Boudreaux Books Web site, http://www.leeboudreauxbooks.com/ (April 5, 2017), author page.
Affinity Konar
Author of MISCHLING
Interviewed by Benjamin Rybeck on September 8, 2016
Upon first impression, Affinity Konar seems an unlikely candidate to tackle any piece of historical fiction, let alone a novel about the Holocaust. “I didn’t come from a historical fiction viewpoint,” she tells me, and in fact envied the confidence of friends who chose to write that way. Furthermore, another novel about one of the most studied tragedies of the twentieth century? “Why would [anyone] need it from me? That question stalled me for years.” To avoid psyching herself out, Konar avoided certain big World War II and Holocaust novels of recent years, like All the Light We Cannot See and The Book of Aron, not reading them until after her own work of historical fiction, Mischling, was completed.
For Konar, the entry point into this novel—finally—was voice and language. Hence her two narrators, twin sisters named Pearl and Sasha, stuck in the nightmare of Auschwitz and Josef Mengele’s Zoo, a place where the infamous Nazi doctor performed grotesque human experiments. “I didn’t want to obscure torment,” Konar tells me, “but I wanted to show how someone would obscure torment in order to survive it.” From there, the book became a story of “masking and then unmasking” as the girls try to navigate the horrors.
The plot of Mischling involves the horrors of Mengele’s Zoo, the separation of the twins, and an eventual journey across Poland. But this is one of those novels where the point of view and language seem paramount: it’s one of the most “interior” novels about tragedy I’ve ever read. And a reader can feel clearly Konar’s love for her characters. “They became a way to, I don’t know…” she pauses. “It sounds intimate, but I definitely felt like a better person when I was writing about them. They’re brave, where I’m not brave. [They’re] able to sort things out with certain perspectives, able to imagine forgiving people, able to imagine moving on with life after trauma.” For her, writing about them was a way of writing about who she herself wanted to be.
Obviously the opposite is true when writing about Mengele. He’s not the novel’s central character, but he casts quite a shadow. The real Mengele was good looking, charming, and often showed great sensitivity and love for children, particularly twins—even as he was preparing to do unspeakable things to them. “The surreality of Mengele was a problem,” Konar says, and some of what he did was beyond belief. “There were so many real experiments I chose not to include in the book because they almost felt like a violation. If survivors themselves won’t speak of these things, I won’t either.”
Continue reading >
But Konar, a fan of antiheroes in shows like Breaking Bad and Mr. Robot, had to sometimes watch her presentation of Mengele. “There’s so much entertainment value in people who tempt you to treat them like a moral puzzle. Everyone will agree he was evil, but they also want to know how he was able to seem to love children.” Konar, therefore, kept coming back to a simple truth: “he didn’t see any of [the children] as human.” Mischling becomes, then, a very moral treatment of an immoral character, mostly because it calls out his total immorality. Or, as Konar says, “his actions speak for him.”
Does all of this sound grim? Of course it is. But then, Konar herself is gregarious—shy, yes, and soft-spoken, but with a great deal of laughter and friendliness over the phone. For this book, her second (after a previous novel called The Illustrated Version of Things), she made a leap from an indie publisher, Fiction Collective Two, to Hachette, one of the biggest publishers there is. When I ask her about it—what it’s like to suddenly see her own book everywhere—she laughs. “I have the box [of books] downstairs. I haven’t opened it yet!”
See, Mischling was the first book she ever wrote, but publishing a smaller book first helped her navigate this one. Her first book also contained plenty of dark material, but it was also a book about language—something she had trouble nailing down in early drafts of Mischling. Working on her first published novel was about “finding my way toward precision….It’s still full of opaque sentences, but it was one of my first stepping stones in trying to figure out how to take what I love from language and decide I’m going to tell a story.”Konar Jacket Image
And so the sheer beauty of the language in Mischling is one of the things that makes the book unlike most other Holocaust novels and helps to create a great deal of tension—tension, by the way, that lurks in the title itself. It’s a lovely sounding word that means a terrible thing: the Nazi legal term to denote a person of mixed Jewish and Aryan heritage. She considered other titles—Twins, for instance, was a suggestion from somebody (“Isn’t there a Danny DeVito movie called that?”)—but finally, Mischling was her preference, even if it scares her, giving the book such a foreign, ugly title. But then again, she tells me, “I think that’s why we love language—the mysterious pull of a word.”
Konar, Affinity: Mischling
Edward B. Cone
Library Journal.
141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p82.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Konar, Affinity. Mischling. Lee Boudreaux: Little, Brown. Sept. 2016. 352p. ISBN 9780316308106. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780316308083. lib. ebk.
ISBN 9780316269414. F
Horrific beyond words is not too strong a characterization of this first novel, featuring the young Polish Jewish twins Stasha and Pearl Zamorski,
who have been interned in the Auschwitz death camp with other members of their family. The girls catch the eye of Dr. Josef Mengele, who is
fascinated with twins. "Uncle," as inmates call Mengele, isolates them with other twins in what they call the "Zoo," where he often treats them
kindly, bestowing special favors on them to keep them alive. But he also subjects them to gruesome, nonscientific experiments that result in great
suffering and, usually, death. While bonding in the Zoo with other "experiments," as these young victims call themselves, Pearl and Stasha rely
on their closeness to survive the horrors. Eventually, Pearl disappears, and Stasha's determination to find out what happened to her propels the
narrative. VERDICT Titled after the pejorative Nazi German word for "mixed blood," though Zwillinge ("twins") might have been more apt, this
searing work deepens our understanding of the Holocaust. It is highly recommended for that reason and for its stunningly original approach to a
subject that would be too awful to read about if rendered in straightforward prose. [See Prepub Alert, 3/28/16.]--Edward B. Cone, New York
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cone, Edward B. "Konar, Affinity: Mischling." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 82. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459804979&it=r&asid=1b34ba80d52b8fbc476a59acbd49715e. Accessed 5 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459804979
---
3/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1488764895431 2/4
Mischling
Bryce Christensen
Booklist.
112.22 (Aug. 1, 2016): p27.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Mischling. By Affinity Konar. Sept. 2016.352p. Little, Brown/Lee Boudreaux, $27 (9780316308106); e book, $13.99 (9780316308083).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
No zoo ever operated on more devilish principles than the cruel zoo of paired human specimens maintained by Josef Mengele, who culled twins
from the prisoners at Auschwitz for insidious comparative experiments. Yet in the factual testimonies of survivors of this monstrous zoo, Konar
finds inspiration for fiction of rare poignancy--and astonishing hope. Daughters of a Jewish physician spirited into oblivion by Nazi goons, the
12-year-old twins Stasha and Pearl Zagorski find themselves among Auschwitz Zoo specimens, in the hands of a doctor fiendishly unlike their
tender father. Victims themselves of Mengele's malevolence and witnesses of his atrocities against others, Stasha and Pearl sustain each other
through role-playing games of death-defying imagination. Unfolding out of Stasha's anguished psyche, Konar's compelling narrative conveys a
surviving twin's intense grief when Pearl disappears--and her courageous refusal to succumb to that grief, or to pain, starvation, or despair, even
in the waning months of the war, when Auschwitz's overlords desperately destroy evidence of their crimes. With Feliks--another zoo specimen
who has lost a twin sibling--Stasha escapes from a death march of Auschwitz inmates, aflame with fantasies of vengeance against Mengele and
with luminous if jumbled dreams of a better future. An unforgettable sojourn of the spirit.--Bryce Christensen
YA/M: This intense novel will provide humanizing support for students studying the Holocaust. SH.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Christensen, Bryce. "Mischling." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 27. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460761636&it=r&asid=564f912608c83418e09cfc39c6dfd5ae. Accessed 5 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460761636
---
3/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1488764895431 3/4
Mischling
Publishers Weekly.
263.23 (June 6, 2016): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Mischling
Affinity Konar. LB/Boudreaux, $27 (352p) ISBN 978-0-316-30810-6
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Without sentimentality, Konar's gripping novel explores the world of the children who were the subjects of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele's
horrifying experiments at Auschwitz. Stasha and Pearl, 12-year-old Jewish sisters from Poland, are placed in Mengele's "zoo" because they are
twins, rather than being sent to the gas chambers. Stasha is impulsive, a little melancholy, and given to storytelling; Pearl is more restrained and
observant, and less dependent on her sister. Mengele selects one of the sisters to torture and uses the other as a control in his experiment. The two
narrate alternating chapters of their story, which begins when they are sent to the camp in the autumn of 1944. The latter part takes the novel into
the chaotic months after Auschwitz was abandoned, when some of the inmates were set on a death march and others were liberated by the Allies.
Konar neatly avoids making Mengele the center of attention, instead focusing on the girls and the people they meet in the zoo, including brash,
mouthy Bruna; conflicted Dr. Miri, a Jewish physician conscripted to work for "Uncle Doctor" Mengele; and messenger boy Peter, whose
affection for Pearl threatens the closeness of the twins. Konar makes every sentence count; it's to her credit that the girls never come across as
simply victims: they're flawed, memorable characters trying to stay alive. This is a brutally beautiful novel. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord
Literistic. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Mischling." Publishers Weekly, 6 June 2016, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454730969&it=r&asid=aec4dcabd18c532a45e0347686ef22e4. Accessed 5 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454730969
---
3/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1488764895431 4/4
The Illustrated Version of Things
Publishers Weekly.
256.4 (Jan. 26, 2009): p97.
COPYRIGHT 2009 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Illustrated Version of Things
Affinity Konar. Univ. of Alabama/Fiction
Collective Two, $17.95 paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-57366-147-8
Emotionally raw and curiously disjointed, this first novel follows the increasing alienation of a mentally unstable young woman in pursuit of her
mother. The unnamed narrator and her younger half-brother, Miguel, were taken from their addict mother and grew up in numerous foster homes.
Over the last year the narrator has been institutionalized, then placed with her dotty grandparents, while Miguel has been living with a more
conventional family and attending high school. Though the narrator wants to be part of Miguel's clean-cut new life, her ill-fated attempts at fitting
in--cheating, selling her meds--only embarrass him. For a while, she is reunited with her biological father, but she begins to wander from one
bizarre adventure to another, in and out of jobs, then returns to the hospital, hoping to be readmitted. The search for her mother begins to consume
her, perilously, as she turns delusional, all the while grasping for scraps of information that win her more derision than sympathy. Konar's daffy
coming-of-age novel isn't entirely convincing, but the moments of bold, vivid prose show promise. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Illustrated Version of Things." Publishers Weekly, 26 Jan. 2009, p. 97+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA192899274&it=r&asid=c1b8612d3388f3ce08352b8279ece77c. Accessed 5 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A192899274
The Holocaust novel ‘Mischling,’ by Affinity Konar, is horrible and beautiful
FILED UNDERBOOKS AT SEP 1 SHARE
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
EMAIL
Print This Story
Written by
Profile image for Steven G. Kellman
Steven G. Kellman, Special Contributor
Connect with Steven G. Kellman Email
Don't miss a story. Like us on Facebook.
LIKE DALLAS NEWS' FACEBOOK PAGE
At the entrance to Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, a.k.a. "the Angel of Death," examines Pearl and Stasha Zamorski, 12-year-old Jews deported from their home in Lodz.
Identical twins, the girls seem promising additions to Mengele's Zoo, the section of Auschwitz reserved for young biological oddities -- twins, triplets, dwarfs, various children with deformities that intrigue the Nazi. Unlike other newcomers to Auschwitz, selected youngsters are spared immediate extermination, and they are even fed enough to stay alive. However, they also become specimens of human vivisection, subjects of Mengele's sadistic experiments. It is late 1944, weeks before the Soviet army liberates the camp and sends Mengele fleeing.
Affinity Konar, author of MischlingGabriela Michanie
Affinity Konar, author of Mischling Gabriela Michanie
Pearl and Sasha do not look stereotypically Jewish. Noting their blond hair, Mengele asks their mother: "They are mischlinge?" In fact, according to the Third Reich's laws of racial purity, the girls are not mixed-blood. Their Jewish father, a physician who never returned from a house call, also happened to be fair. Mischling exposes the horrendous consequences of a genetic taxonomy that exalts some as members of the master race and reduces others to untermenschen worthy of elimination. Drawn from the abundant documentation of the Holocaust, Affinity Konar's unbearable but transcendent debut novel imagines the ordeal of Jewish twins at the hands of the jovial sociopath they are asked to call "Uncle Doctor." In its blend of realism and fantasy, cruelty and beauty, the book itself affirms the value of mischling.
That the world's most advanced nation would systematically vilify and slaughter millions of fellow Europeans beggars the imagination. But, within Mengele's Zoo, imagination is an essential survival tool, a mechanism for preserving hope. Later, though, it becomes an instrument of torment. In the second part of the novel, after the camp has been abandoned, Stasha reports that: "I wanted the death of my imagination more than anything. It had no place in this world after war."
Before handing her two daughters off to Mengele, Mama tells him that Pearl, the elder by 10 minutes, loves music and dance. However, "Stasha, my Stasha," Mama says, "she has an imagination."
Until Pearl disappears, she and Stasha take turns narrating chapters, and as the toxins that Mengele injects into them distort their perceptions, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine when they are recounting dreams or hallucinations. Stasha relates two versions of the return from Auschwitz. In one, she and a brutalized boy named Feliks ride off toward Warsaw on horseback intent on wreaking vengeance, while in the other, Stasha is part of a wretched troop of 35 surviving children who wend their way to Krakow.
From the twins' adolescent perspective, the camp is a model of innocence traduced. Stasha is a charmer who is convinced that Mengele's fondness for her means she cannot die. Though noxious drops he inserts into her eye dim Stasha's vision, Uncle Doctor remains to her a genial and vicious enigma who dispenses sugar cubes but also pours boiling water into her ear. As Mengele's medicine transforms each girl differently, each twin pines for her missing other self. Mengele's zookeepers include a kindly conscript called Twins' Father who saves a few lives by passing them off as twins, as well as a Jewish doctor, Miri, who is wracked by guilt over surgery she must perform.
Mischling, by Affinity Konar
Mischling, by Affinity Konar
Inmate gossip conveys a little about the rest of Auschwitz -- including Canada, the warehouses to store stolen loot, and Puff, a brothel staffed by women whose lives are spared to service Nazi lust. Occasionally, Konar employs anticipatory retrospection to provide a larger picture than either Pearl or Stasha can see at the time -- that, for example, more than 7,600 inmates would be too weak to abandon Auschwitz when the guards depart or that Mengele would find haven in South America.
Stasha takes heart by recalling her father's conviction that "...beauty redeems the world." It seems a refutation of Theodor Adorno's famous pronouncement that: "After Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric." Konar's novel is filled with exquisitely crafted phrases; for example, when Stasha comes upon a family of refugees hiding in a haystack, she sees "a peepery of eyes. They were scattered in the manner of constellation, and with equal glitter."
Nevertheless, the aesthetic achievement of Mischling cannot redeem the world after Auschwitz. It merely illuminates it, woefully, brilliantly.