Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, with which it is likely to be compared (and hold up well in the bargain), Eisenstein’s memoir is...
String Hebrew-language chicken tags together, and you’ll discover that the word “kosher” spells “Jew” sideways. So this brilliantly conceived child’s-eye view of the Shoah generation reveals—to name just one mystery unraveled.
The faux-naïve drawing that accompanies the revelation in Torontonian artist/editor/writer Eisenstein’s debut book, incidentally, proves that point, just as the other drawings in this richly illustrated graphic book open windows on a world once very much in danger of disappearing. The adult Eisenstein, who turns up from time to time to remark on her younger self, has the language and self-awareness to consider herself something of a “Jewish Sisyphus, pushing history and memory uphill, wondering what I’m supposed to be.” Her younger self wonders about other things: her mother’s worries and fears, her father’s anger. At eight years old, she is introduced to The Diary of Anne Frank and falls under the spell of the swastika, asking her sister how to draw one, as if daring to conjure up the devil; when the devil does not appear, she and her sister agree on one thing: to keep the whole thing a secret from their parents. Her father has secrets, too, even a semi-secret life centered on poker, for here, he is a Hall of Fame master of the art of korten shpiling. Her mother has memories carefully kept hidden, which she unveils in a surprising tape-recorded interview for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. “You’d think if you put people together in such terrible conditions, they would eat each other up,” she recalls. “No—we fed ourselves with white lies of hope.” Page after page, anecdote after sketch, Eisenstein teases out an affecting portrait.
Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, with which it is likely to be compared (and hold up well in the bargain), Eisenstein’s memoir is an ultimately hopeful act, enshrining ordinary people so that they will not be forgotten, wrinkles and warts and secrets and all.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2006
ISBN: 1-59448-918-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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