Upside Down BRRip 2012

Imagine a book that is so toxic that rigorous hand-washing is required after coming into contact with it. This book in question is a 1938 copy of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler's political manifesto. Karen and Fred Mandell of Boston, parents of filmmaker Hinda Mandell, have displayed this book upside down on their bookshelf for decades. "I was repulsed by it on the one hand. But on the other hand I didn't want to let it go because it would have been a way of surrender," said Fred Mandell, whose uncle - a Jewish-American soldier - brought home the book from Germany at the end of World War II. With only a bare-bones inscription on the inside cover, the filmmakers investigate the power of family lore as they track down the original owners of the Mein Kampf. "The Upside Down Book" seeks to build bridges between two very different families nearly 70 years after the end of World War II. Mandell's essays about this international investigation have appeared in the LA Times, Jewish Daily Forward and the Boston Globe - where the articles made it to the publication's "most-emailed list." Indeed, it was after Mandell published two articles on this Mein Kampf in the Boston Globe in 2010, focusing on the tension this book caused her family, that she got the idea to create a documentary film on the topic.