By Your Blood You Will Live

A Chronicle of Survival

De: Leyb Rochman

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

In By Your Blood You Will Live, Leyb Rochman chronicles his life of survival during the Holocaust. Begun in hiding, and completed in the years after World War II, Rochman’s chronicle reads more like a novel than a memoir. Published in Yiddish in Paris, where it won the 1949 Hoffer-Leyb Prize, and first appearing in English in 1983 as part of the Holocaust Library, By Your Blood You Will Live makes palpable both the horrors and the hopes of individuals who did all they could to live rather than die by their blood.

AI narration was lacking

The AI voice sounds female yet the main character telling the story is male. That threw me off, because it is a book written from the perspective of the male author. The book is written as if he is reading his journal entries, sharing his experiences in hiding with his family during the war. It was harder to picture, took some time to follow which character was telling the story , again because the AI voice sounds very feminine. Once I was able to adapt to that, reminding myself who was telling the story along the way - his lived experience made we wonder how anyone survived against such odds - and yet they did (with so much loss and despair along the way).