Your father's story is an amazing experience and written in the NOW w/those short sentences, almost breathless, makes it very compelling.
The first chapter that speaks so clearly of young Sol's personality, boasting of his looks, his smarts, and how he hates what shames him/that old white horse that carries the rags and brushes he must sell, and his father who disdains him as a curse for causing a failed trip to America.
"I know what I like to do , and I can do it, but I'm not good at taking orders from anyone....I'm too ambitious.." Sol says
And you read on of his clever escapes from the Germans, his dangerous work with the Partisans, and then siding with the Russians to gain more control in his life. And all this as he sees his family and Jewish culture being erased in the most demeaning ways. You realize he was regularly confronted with life and death experiences that demanded he re-invent himself so, as you say in the title " THE NAZIS COULD NOT KILL HIM", or the Russians, or the Circus Man or the accidents that almost took him down. The anger that seethed in him, and drove him to violence when , at last,he could cut down the fleeing Germans like they did his people, was hard to take but understandable. He strove to be outstanding in his experiences and spoke of them boastfully as if he was speaking for his family, his people whose chance to excel was taken from them.
His love affair with Luba, his wife, was as precarious as his military journey, both despair and anger at separation, almost giving up, but then the wonderful miracle of the chance meeting at a railroad station. By this time Sol knew she had saved his life with her own brand of toughness, a more tender one.
The book is a special experience, Lisa. Is the book from a diary that he kept? Did he write in the present tense or did you translate and present it as such? Or did he tell you the story as you spell out on the cover of the book., and you put it in order? It is very effective. I am really impressed.
Jeanne Porter