A worthy addition to Holocaust literature, evoking the sweetness of one life lost and reminding us with urgent clarity how...
The journal of a bright young woman who was among the many French Jews funneled through Drancy, the Parisian collection camp, to Nazi death camps.
The book opens on April 7, 1942, when the author was 21. She was reading Shakespeare, Hemingway and Keats. She had a warm circle of friends and family. She wrote of her Sorbonne graduate studies in English literature, of chamber music, picnics and the opposite sex. She received regular postcards from an absent boyfriend (en route to join the Free French), but her new sweetheart was handsome Jean Morawiecki, whom she met at the Sorbonne. Berr wrote of belles-lettres, Beethoven and the bewilderment of young love in that summer of ’42. Then came the decree that all Jews must wear a yellow badge with a six-pointed star. (Her father was arrested for wearing his improperly affixed.) Jews could not attend theaters or restaurants or cross the Champs-Elysées. The edicts brought increasing isolation; Berr worked in a clandestine group that placed Jewish children with families in unoccupied France. Gradually quotidian life succumbed to the inescapable. In her diary, Berr to turned to philosophy and thoughts of mortality, as in the entry that commented, “I am leading a posthumous life.” Such big thoughts combine with small daily concerns in the journal, and it’s the small things that give her account its considerable power. The reader, not the writer, is always aware of the impending end: Berr died at Bergen-Belsen five days before the British liberated the camp. Her diary was passed along several pages at a time and eventually reached its intended reader, Morawiecki, who had escaped to fight the Nazis. “I’ll come back, you know,” she wrote. “Jean, I will come back.” And, in a way, she has; the journal recently became a bestseller in France. Useful additional material is provided by translator Bellos.
A worthy addition to Holocaust literature, evoking the sweetness of one life lost and reminding us with urgent clarity how inexorably it was swept under those tragic times.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60286-064-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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