The Berlin Boxing Club

K.O The Berlin Boxing Club, written by Robert Sharenow, was published April 21st, 2011. It’s publisher is HarperTeen, and it was published in New York City.

The book I endeavored in was about a young Jew named Karl Stern. Karl doesn’t wish to be Jewish, especially because of the discrimination occurring at his school. He and his mother do not look Jewish, but unfortunately for his father and his sister, they have piercing black curly hair. This is unfortunate because that’s how people often told i you were Jewish or not, your looks. At school, Karl is mistreated. He is followed by the “Wolf Pack”, a group of kids who patronize Jewish kids.

The run after him and beat him up, giving him several bruises and a black eye. Karl convince his mother and father he fell down stairs at school, but someone knows better. Karl’s father owns a shop, of which him and his sister work at occasionally. He sells art, and at a banquet Karl and his father encounter a world class boxer, Max Schmeling. Max, at first encounter of Karl, notices his black eye. He realized that wasn’t from falling down some stairs, Karl was just defenseless.

His father sells Max a painting, and in return, Max offers Karl boxing lessons. He gives Karl a training regiment and Karl obeys it every day. Karl begins his training, eventually coming close to his goal. When Max brings him to the Berlin Boxing club, he feels weird there. He receives a weird vibe, and the employee are all narcissistic. Eventually Karl and his sister get kicked out of their school because they’re Jewish, and then are forced to go to a school for jews.

Even though neither of them want to go there, they must because it is the only way for them to gather an education. Throughout the book, Max enters Karl in many fights, and each fight Karl enters, he becomes a better fighter. How will Max save his family from their lack of money and discrimination? Read The Berlin Boxing Club to find out. My book, The Berlin Boxing Club, is 399 pages long. Though that is typically a lot for me to read, the font is fairly large. The author uses easy to understand vocabulary, and by doing this it makes it easier to understand the reading.

The focus of the novel was to show the amount of discrimination in this era of time. There are specific instances throughout the book that show how desperate people were for food, money, even education. The lack of business led to no money, and people needed to do whatever they could in order to get it. In example, Max’s father has his illegally deliver packages to mysterious houses in the middle of the nights, just to make a couple dollars. They barely have enough food for them to eat, and this is a result of no money.

Since they got kicked out of school, Max and his sister were no longer learning the normal curriculum from their old school. They were forced to wear Jewish hats and learn about Jewish religion. The focus helped the reader realize how cruel the intentions and actions were of the Nazi’s. The way the book is written, it makes the reader feel sympathetic for the Jewish people in the novel. The author does this by explaining specific things in more critical depth the emphasize the cruelty.

In example, when Max gets beaten up in school. The author takes a long time to describe this and he uses powerful words to describe this occurrence. I read the Berlin Boxing Club by Robert Sharenow and it helped increase my understanding of the depression and those affected by it.