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Suicidal Secret

Today on Tablet

by
Marc Tracy
February 03, 2011

Contributing editor Daphne Merkin reviews a new memoir today in Tablet Magazine that, atypically (and refreshingly), focuses not on the memoirist but on her grandparents, Hungarian Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who killed themselves on the same day in 1991. Merkin gleans from the book a lesson on “the impenetrable otherness of other people” as well as, potentially, an explanation for author Johanna Adorján’s grandparents’ gruesome and seemingly incomprehensible act.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.