Aharon Appelfeld's starkly philosophical survivor's meditation on Auschwitz makes a daunting assignment for Mark Podwal, who has created what looks discomfortingly like a logo for the Holocaust. Podwal's forceful, freehand style seems very right here: the messy junctures of the Star of David's interior corners, the needle's big, lopsided eye. The needle's path through the top of the star at once suggests lethal violence and references the cloth stars that the Nazis forced Jews to wear before liquidating the ghettos and shipping the wearers to their deaths--graphic wit, if it's not too crass to call it that. The thread made of barbed wire seems appropriate as well: however overused barbed wire is as an icon of oppression, the stuff does have a strong historical association with the camps. But then having the barbed wire encircle the star... to me, that's over-literal.
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