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Max

Alex Miller

4.02 · Rating details · 53 ratings · 22 reviews

An astonishing, moving tribute to Alex's friend, Max Blatt, that is at once a meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity.

'Max tells of Alex Miller's search -- in turns fearful and elated -- for the elusive past of Max Blatt, a man he loves, who loved him and who taught him that he must write with love. Miller di An astonishing, moving tribute to Alex's friend, Max Blatt, that is at once a meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity.

'Max tells of Alex Miller's search -- in turns fearful and elated -- for the elusive past of Max Blatt, a man he loves, who loved him and who taught him that he must write with love. Miller discovers that he is also searching for a defining part of himself, formed by his relation to Max Blatt, but whose significance will remain obscure until he finds Max, complete, in his history. With Max, Miller the novelist has written a wonderful work of non-fiction, as fine as the best of his novels. Always a truth-seeker, he has rendered himself vulnerable, unprotected by the liberties permitted to fiction. Max is perhaps his most moving book, a poignant expression of piety, true to his mentor's injunction to write with love.' Raimond Gaita, award-winning author of Romulus, My Father

I began to see that whatever I might write about Max, discover about him, piece together with those old shards of memory, it would be his influence on the friendships of the living that would frame his story in the present.

According to your 1939 Gestapo file, you adopted the cover names Landau and Maxim. The name your mother and father gave you was Moses. We knew you as Max. You had worked in secret. From an early age you concealed yourself - like the grey box beetle in the final country of your exile, maturing on its journey out of sight beneath the bark of the tree.

You risked death every day. And when at last the struggle became hopeless, you escaped the hell and found a haven in China first, and then Australia, where you became one of those refugees who, in their final place of exile, chose not death but silence and obscurity.

Alex Miller followed the faint trail of Max Blatt's early life for five years. Max's story unfolded, slowly at first, from the Melbourne Holocaust Centre's records then to Berlin's Federal Archives. From Berlin, Miller travelled to Max's old home town of Wroclaw in Poland. And finally in Israel with Max's niece, Liat Shoham, and her brother Yossi Blatt, at Liat's home in the moshav Shadmot Dvora in the Lower Galilee, the circle of friendship was closed and the mystery of Max's legendary silence was unmasked.

Max is an astonishing and moving tribute to friendship, a meditation on memory itself, and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity.

'A wonderful book. It is a story that needs to be heard.' Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University

'It is a beautiful and haunting book…There is something sacred about this story, this delicate act of remembrance…There is a slow, elegant circling in the book's storytelling, as if those precious shards are held up to the light and turned to reveal their facets. But there is a compelling journey of discovery too, not so much into the light as into the darkness, into Max's silence. In Max, the reader becomes engaged in a fascinating, visceral wrestling with facts, the power of the imagination and the character of truth…This book so beautifully evokes the power of places in shaping our consciousness and perception.' - Tom Griffiths. Emeritus Professor, ANU ...more

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Paperback, 262 pages

Published September 29th 2020 by Allen & Unwin (first published 2020)

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Oct 07, 2020 Gloria Arthur rated it really liked it

Shelves: the-bookshelf

⭐️3.5 Stars⭐️
This is a non-fiction account of the authors search to find out more about the history of his late friend's life. His friend Max Blatt is a holocaust survivor and was a mentor and friend to Alex Miller.

Max had only revealed fragments of his life during the war to Alex who after his death travels overseas to learn more and search for Max’s remaining family.

The central theme of this story is connection and the way our lives past and present are connected to other people, new friendshi ...more

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Oct 01, 2020 Janelle rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2020

Part memoir, part biography, part tribute to a friend, Max tells of Alex Miller’s search for the life and family of his friend Max Blatt. Max revealed only fragments of his life prior to moving to Australia. One thing he did tell Miller was that he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. “What broke me,’he confessed that evening, in words I have not forgotten, ‘was when I realised my tormentor was my brother.”
Miller travels to Poland and Germany to discover what he can. This is a moving book, ...more

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Nov 28, 2020 Carolyn marked it as not-finished · review of another edition

I previously read Miller’s fictionalised autobiography, The Passage of Love, in which the real person Max Blatt appears as the character Martin Bloch. Miller has recently published this non-fiction book about his search for Max Blatt’s story. He knew he had been tortured by the Gestapo and had escaped to eventually find refuge in Australia. I was keen to follow Miller's exploration but about a third of the way through I gave it up. I felt it was a rather meandering approach and that I was not le ...more

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Oct 23, 2020 Carolyn rated it really liked it

Max, the novel by Alex Miller is a beautiful and very interesting account and memoir of one very important man's life.

It's very well written and portrayed.

Thank you to the publishers, Allen and Unwin for a copy of this book to read. ...more

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Sep 26, 2020 Richard Harrison rated it really liked it

Deeply affecting and interesting, I devoured this book very quickly but I need some time to really allow it to soak in. Largely the story of the author's quest to unearth the history of his late friend and holocaust survivor, it largely delves into the impermanence of history, the way so much is lost or skewed by perspective. Was definitely fascinated by the author's recollections of his friend and the personal impact of the search. It felt at times as if the book told me more about Miller himse ...more

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Oct 09, 2020 Lisa rated it really liked it

Shelves: c21st, memoir, australia, 20review

Max, by Alex Miller, is the poignant account of the author's quest to discover the truth about a man who thought his life was futile. It is, as the blurb says:

An astonishing, moving tribute to Alex's friend, Max Blatt, that is at once a meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity

Max Blatt was the husband of Ruth Blatt, who was a friend of my mother's. She went to Ruth for private lessons in German, but she never mentioned Max, and no Max, by Alex Miller, is the poignant account of the author's quest to discover the truth about a man who thought his life was futile. It is, as the blurb says:

An astonishing, moving tribute to Alex's friend, Max Blatt, that is at once a meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity

Max Blatt was the husband of Ruth Blatt, who was a friend of my mother's. She went to Ruth for private lessons in German, but she never mentioned Max, and now I know why. Max was a solitary man, who would have absented himself when my mother arrived for her lessons. I also know now that Ruth was the breadwinner in the family because decades after WW2, Max suffered from poor health as a result of torture at the hands of the Germans. He had been a member of a German Resistance group, and they had tortured him for weeks.

The book begins with Miller's surprising admission that he did not go to the funeral of this dear friend. At the time of Max's death back in 1981, Miller was teaching and working in theatre, and he was ashamed to admit that he had failed to live up to Max's belief in his future as an author. Rather than admit to his three failed attempts at novels, Miller stayed out of the way of his best friend and confidante, and two years went by before Ruth rang to tell him that Max had died. She was hurt by Miller's absence at the funeral, and by his failure to explain himself. Guilt has obviously gnawed away at him ever since.

Decades passed, but when the opportunity to visit Berlin arose, it became a catalyst for the quest to find out about the parts of Max's life that had never been revealed, concealed within a deep silence that he broke only rarely. He wanted to write about Max, a man who was very important to him, but he did not want to write fiction, he wanted to write the truth of his life. In this context, it's impossible to forget the novelised version of Ruth Blatt's life, fictionalised as Ruth Becker in Anna Funder's All That I Am...

The sections of this book are named as Fragments rather than chapters, and in Fragment 14, he has this to say:

[Max's] story is a scatter of such broken shards. That is its nature. Almost its central truth. It is a ruined house. Liked the bombed-out houses of my childhood after the war. The pieces were violently blown apart, many of them ground to dust. To fill in the gaps with the imagination, as if all the pieces could still be located by imagining them, to write as if nothing of value was lost, and lost forever, would be to deny the tragedy of his story. It would be to miss the truth of his times, when many of the most beautiful things were lost, and truth itself was lost. Some things can never be retrieved. (p.145)

But there are different kinds of truth:

It is my belief that shared family myths are important and have a way of persisting and nurturing us despite what might come to seem to us in later life to be their lack of objective truth. [...] Something called objective truth is not always achievable, and informed speculation [...] remains critical to the historian's ability to present us with an understanding of the subject. Often our shared family myths, which arise from this informed speculation, embody a private, even a poetic truth for us that can never be found in the official prose of government documents and scholarly articles. Our emotional investment in the results of our research can never carry the same quality of intimacy for us as that carried in stories we received from our parents during our childhood years. (p.170)

And so, as fragments of Max's life and the fate of his family are discovered, most of it through unexpected chance encounters, and much of it still unclear, Miller comes to believe that there is a moral imperative in the kind of truth-telling that he wants to do in homage to his friend...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/10/09/m... ...more

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Jan 19, 2021 Meg rated it really liked it

Shelves: australian, biography, non-fiction, owned

This is the story of Alex Miller telling the story of Max Blatt. Max was a Jewish German spy and Alex's best friend. Alex reveals small fragments of Max and his family's life stories while describing his travels and quests to uncover Max's history. I enjoyed this part of the book, Miller would make a great travel writer! I found the sections about Max to be too fragmented to really connect with though, maybe I need to read The Passage of Love which is a fictionalised take on Max's history. I als ...more

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Jan 16, 2021 Lesley Moseley rated it liked it

3 1/2. stars. Almost gave up about 1/3 of the way, but went on and suddenly, as happened to me , when doing my own geology research, amazing 'coincidences' happens. You 'bump' into people who know someone, and the whole project starts gathering a pace of it own. Ended up really glad I continued. ...more

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Dec 06, 2020 Pam Tickner rated it liked it

Thank you Allen and Unwin for sending me a copy of this book, a tribute to Miller's holocaust survivor friend Max Blatt. It is foremost a reminiscence on the meaning of friendship and a search for truths which may never be known. ...more

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Sep 28, 2020 John Reid rated it really liked it

Ruth spoke to Alex one day in 1981, asking why he hadn’t attended Max’s funeral. It all began as a shock of guilt… ‘The shock of grief came later, when I was alone.’

Alex Miller is a noted Australian author and playwright. The Max about whom he writes was Max Blatt, a Polish Jew and union organiser opposed to Hitler’s National Socialism who was imprisoned and tortured, but who made good his escape after WW2, with his wife Ruth, through Asia and, finally, from China to Australia.

Max had been a me Ruth spoke to Alex one day in 1981, asking why he hadn’t attended Max’s funeral. It all began as a shock of guilt… ‘The shock of grief came later, when I was alone.’

Alex Miller is a noted Australian author and playwright. The Max about whom he writes was Max Blatt, a Polish Jew and union organiser opposed to Hitler’s National Socialism who was imprisoned and tortured, but who made good his escape after WW2, with his wife Ruth, through Asia and, finally, from China to Australia.

Max had been a mentor, a coach and a prompt to a young writer and educator, and they had become close - Ruth said Max considered Alex his best friend - but by the late 1970s Max found his teaching and his work in theatre repugnant. He’d made numerous attempts at writing a novel but lacked the self-belief to persevere as Max would have expected of him. ‘It had been easier, and more cowardly, to stay away from ...a man cultivated, wise and generous.’

Alex now felt a compunction to search for details of a man with whom he’d spent a great deal of time, because Max had never been totally forthcoming about his early life. What was to follow became a book simply titled Max.

The search took Alex (and his wife, Stephanie) to a variety of locations and some interesting settings, from meeting Dr Horn, a senior figure at Germany’s Bundesarchiv, to placing flowers on the grave of poet, Marek Edelman, in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery, and a drive across Israel, ‘...a land of steep ravines, the bones of the earth shattered.’

The story proves absorbing and involving to someone with broad interest in the war, especially as it relates to treatment of Jews and the changes to boundaries and national identity (not that this is anything new, many central European countries having faced ‘Endless wars for possession.’)

The mood of the book varies, page to page, between wonder, shock, humour, sorrow and, decidedly, love, and ends with a scene of new friendships, Alex taking a photograph,

‘This group of friends who had arrived in my life ...were real and whole, while Max would always remain our common link, a broken vessel, the most precious parts of his life scattered among the ruins of the terrible past.’
...more

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Sep 26, 2020 Anna Maree rated it it was amazing

In this book Alex Miller takes us along with him as he decides to find out more about the life of his long time friend Max Blatt. Max had shared snippets of his life with Alex over the many years of their friendship but now that Max has passed away there are many questions that are left unanswered. No matter how well we think we know someone there will always be things from there past and even their deepest inner turmoil in the present that we simply have no knowledge of.
Alex stated that he didn ...more

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Dec 16, 2020 Caren rated it really liked it

(4.5) Alex Miller, the highly respected Australian author, well understood the responsibility and sacredness attached to the act of remembrance. In accepting that responsibility, Miller undertook to research the Holocaust experience of his best friend and mentor, Max Blatt, decades after Blatt's death. Miller also understood that in respecting Blatt's silence during his life in Australia, post-war, "How could there ever be a complete story, a complete portrait...So much of what was once great, o (4.5) Alex Miller, the highly respected Australian author, well understood the responsibility and sacredness attached to the act of remembrance. In accepting that responsibility, Miller undertook to research the Holocaust experience of his best friend and mentor, Max Blatt, decades after Blatt's death. Miller also understood that in respecting Blatt's silence during his life in Australia, post-war, "How could there ever be a complete story, a complete portrait...So much of what was once great, once beautiful, once loved, was smashed and lost forever...We have only fragments...Completeness from such a world would be an obscenity...a lie."

Thus, the acclaimed novelist understood that the book he would write had to be non-fiction, that there could be no place for imagination, no creative filling in the gaps "as if nothing of value was lost, and lost forever." This creation of details would "deny the tragedy of his story." This understanding was fostered by Miller's friendships with well-known Holocaust survivors in the Melbourne Jewish community: Jacob Rosenberg and Kitia Altman. In recognising that Max was a "damaged" man, Miller came to recognise the truth in Jean Amery's conclusion that "Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world."["At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities."]

The extensive research Miller conducted took him to Germany, to Poland, and to Israel, each of his trips supported by his wife and the circle of historians and archivists who joined in his search to piece together as best he could the broken "shards" of Max's lost years. What Miller's journey yielded was the discovery of Max's extended family in Israel - a brother and his children - with whom Miller immediately bonded and with whom he could share his loving memories of the man who had inspired him to write all those years ago. In fact, from this connection, Miller learned that Max had wanted him to write his story, almost as if it were fated that he do so.

What made this book so beautiful was the deep respect and sensitivity of Miller's understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on the survivor and the responsibility we have to remember it, despite the unanswered questions and uncertainties that remain. ...more

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Oct 04, 2020 Cassie Woolley rated it really liked it

I have become conditioned to expect books about the war to be dramatic exposes of atrocities overcome by the human spirit. This book is instead a quiet exploration of the nature of human stories in the context of the author trying to piece together the life story of his friend who has long since passed on.

Miller asks fundamental questions about what it means to tell the story of a life. Is there one truth, one single story that can encompass every detail of a life? Or are our stories composed n ...more

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Dec 22, 2020 Renee Hermansen rated it really liked it

Thanks to A&U for this copy to read and review honestly.

At first I found this book hard to get into but I then found it a very interesting read.

Alex Miller was determined to write his friend Max's story. His research throughout was so thorough, he found lost relatives of Max, visited many countries, searched registrars and read letters, all to uncover the untold mystery that surrounded Max's life. Max was a Jewish Nazi resistance figure who survived the holocaust but lost many family and loved ...more

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Oct 06, 2020 Liz rated it it was amazing

Gentle, heartwarming and hopeful are not words I’d normally associate with stories about Nazi resistance, however Max had this in spades. This is Alex Miller’s memoir about his search to understand his late friend Max Blatt’s life and flesh out the stories which had stuck with Alex long after Max had told them. It is a story of friendships old and new, how the search for Max brought people together to honour him, even if they didn’t know him, and most of all it is a tribute to a dear friend. I e ...more

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Sep 29, 2020 Caroline Poole rated it really liked it

The last line....”Max.....a broken vessel, the most precious parts of his life scattered among ruins of the terrible past.”
A book full of beautiful sentences exploring and discovering his great friend. Such an amazing tribute to an interesting and undiscovered life.
Unfortunately all questions can’t be answered and only makes it even harder to comprehend the millions of unheard stories and voices from this horrific time in history.
A pleasure to read and an honour to know more of Max and his life ...more

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Jan 15, 2021 Deb rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

Quite a gem of a book. Although this is a book that revolves about war, it is a quiet book, full of reflection. Alex Miller is searching for details of his friend's life, after Max's death. The search and involved travel is fascinating as Alex has the good fortune to be introduced to people from Max's earlier life. Stories can always be viewed from many positions.
If you are a fan of Alex Miller's writing, don't miss this! ...more

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Nov 07, 2020 Jane Mulligan rated it really liked it

We are full of flaws and often haunted by regret for past actions and inaction. While we still live we have the ability to think deeply on this. How we have hurt and let the people we love down and how we have the opportunity to atone for this somehow with our future actions. This is a very moving book about love, friendship and self-forgiveness.

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Jan 16, 2021 Samantha Battams rated it it was amazing

Currently enjoying this book! I loved Lovesong and Conditions of Faith (which Alex Miller encouraged me to read when I met him in Adelaide on his book tour on Lovesong). Will read all of his books one day.

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Sep 24, 2020 Jenny Esots rated it it was amazing

My review is coming!

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Oct 12, 2020 Wendy Bridges rated it it was amazing

Brief review to come

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Oct 13, 2020 Samantha rated it really liked it

4.25 stars

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About Alex Miller

Alex Miller

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Alex Miller is one of Australia's best-loved writers, and winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2012.

Alex Miller is twice winner of Australia's premier literary prize, The Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. His fi ...more