![]() The pair travel to Athens, where Jakob's own insistent memories jostle against stories of that city's wartime sufferings, and thence to Toronto, where ``Athos'' has been invited to teach, and where he dies-leaving Jakob to complete his mentor's masterwork, a study of how the Nazis distorted archaeology to alter the past and ``prove'' Aryan supremacy. Jakob's narrative is a rich chronicle of intellectual hungers generously satisfied, as ``Athos's tales of geologists and explorers, cartographers and navigators'' stimulate his young disciple's active imagination-an imagination also possessed by vivid memories of Jakob's dead parents and sister Bella, who appear to him as both vocal and visible presences. The main narrator, Jakob Beer, who tells his story at age 60 in 1992, was a Polish survivor of the Holocaust who, after losing his entire family in 1939, was rescued by Antanasios Roussos, a middle-aged scholar and polymath, who took Jakob to safety and raised him on the Greek island of Zakynthos. A moving tale of survival becomes a grave and stately hymn to the revivifying qualities of language and learning in this impressive debut by a Canadian poet. ![]()
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