Edgar Bronfman and Manny Drukier were both born into Jewish families, within a year of each other. Bronfman was born in Montreal in 1929; Drukier, in Lvov, Poland, 1928. Bronfman was bar mitzvahed in 1942, and, within two weeks, “left Judaism behind.” He cites his bar mitzvah as “the most meaningful spiritual moment of my life.” Drukier was not bar mitzvahed in his 13th year, which fell in 1941. He was instead barely surviving in a Polish ghetto. Fifty years later, on a visit to the country of his birth, Drukier realizes that “I had lost my teenage years, all the games and recreations that come so easily to my children.”

After reading these two accounts of growing up Jewish during the war years, one can only feel admiration for the remarkable humility and humanity of Drukier, a man who has every right to be bitter; and feel only disgust for the boundless arrogance and pomposity of Bronfman, a man who has every right to be thankful.

There is in fact a very good tale to be told about the life of Edgar Bronfman; unfortunately, he’s not the one to do it. Bronfman’s memoir reveals a life devoted first to alienating himself from his father (“Mr. Sam,” who created the Seagram liquor empire inherited by Edgar) and the Jewish people, then to spending his adult years making amends to his father by fighting on behalf of those people as president of the World Jewish Congress. In that capacity, Bronfman becomes a globetrotting superhero, working to free the Jews of the Soviet Union one day, explaining the fine points of a free market economy to Ceaucescu the next. The author gives short shrift to his prodigal shift, merely noting that “I wanted to do something for Father after his death.” For a book called The Making of a Jew, that’s not good enough.

Nor does Bronfman make up for as a writer what he lacks as a diarist. The whole megillah reads like it went straight from a dictaphone over to the offices of Putnam (a subsidiary of MCA, the entertainment giant run by Edgar Bronfman, Jr.). Page after page of bland recollection is filled with meetings with the famous and infamous, who are relegated to the Good or the Bad based on Bronfman’s own Mutual Admiration Metre. Thus, Margaret Thatcher (“Mrs T.”) and George Bush (“the best foreign friend Israel ever had”) are on the side of the Good, while Lech Walesa (“wearing unpressed, ill-fitting, nondescript clothes”) is on the side of the Bad.

There’s no self-congratulation in Drukier’s Carved in Stone. No cheap emotions either. He leaves bitterness, even sorrow, to others, proving himself to be as pragmatic a writer as he was a survivor. His is an amazing story, one that no précis could do justice to.

Moving from village to ghetto, from ghetto to work camp, from work camp to concentration camp, from concentration camp to displaced persons camp, and finally to the New World (Toronto by way of New York), where, to the young boy’s amazement, nobody asks him how he survived the war.

He could have answered: with ingenuity, courage, willfulness – and a little luck. He escaped certain death by defying Nazi orders to board a train whose occupants all perished; he lived because he refused to give in to despair and hopelessness. Despite all this, Drukier never presents himself as a hero. He has no time for introspection during the war; the daily search for food is what occupies his thoughts, and the ingenuity he displays in getting an extra portion of bread or a few frozen potatoes is what carries much of the narrative forward. His final moments with his mother and sister, and his father (with whom he was in touch until the elder Drukier’s death from starvation) are numbingly, achingly beautiful. Drukier does not write sentimentally about these things – he simply recounts them, and the effect is almost unbearable. It’s not until a visit to Poland (which prompts the memories), that he is able to weep over his past, as he sees once again the images that haunt him 50 years later.

Equally impressive and valuable are Drukier’s vivid portraits of a lost community, a way of life, friends, family, all destroyed by hate, and recollected here with love.

Drukier does not shy away from making bold statements that challenge many of our assumptions about the Holocaust and its aftermath. He manages to find something new to say about the well-accepted notion that the Jews went to their deaths like lambs to the slaughter; about why the last remaining camp survivors were sent on forced marches near the end of the war; and, most controversially, why the victims of the Warsaw ghetto uprising weren’t necessarily heroes to the Jews of Poland.

“I have little patience for people who are self-centred,” writes Drukier near the end of his story. “Their love of themselves and their attitude of looking after Number One nauseate me.” It would be interesting to know what Drukier makes of Edgar Bronfman. I think I can guess.