I'm No Hero

"When the family was liberated by the Russians after eighteen months in hiding, Henry, at age fifteen, was emaciated and too weak to walk. The Friedmans eventually made their way to a displaced persons camp in Austria where Henry quickly learned to wheel and deal, seducing women of various ages and nationalities, and mastering the intricacies of the black market. In I'm No Hero, he faces with unblinking honesty the pain, the shame, and the bizarre comedy of his passage to adulthood."--BOOK JACKET. "The family came to Seattle in 1949, where Henry Friedman has made his home ever since. In 1988 he returned with this wife to Brody and Suchowala, where he succeeded in finding Julia Symchuck, who, as a young girl, had warned his father that the Gestapo was looking for him, and whose family had hidden the Friedmans in their loft. The following year he was able to bring Julia to Seattle for a triumphal visit, where she was honored in many ways, although, as Friedman writes, "in her own country she had never been honored with anything except hard work.""--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.