A fine addition to the literature of the Holocaust (that “permanent tribal wound, engraved on our souls”) and a good account...
A memorable, literate work on the immigrant experience in postwar America.
Born in Russia in 1944 to Polish Jews who had fled east to escape the Nazis, Berger (The Young Scientists, 1994) came with his family to New York five years later. The move was a blessing for Berger, who thereafter grew up in a cosmopolitan city full of immigrants from all over the world shedding their languages and manners to start anew. But it was a mixed blessing for his mother, who was more set in her ways and less eager to become an American. “You were foolish,” she complained to her long-suffering husband. “We should have gone to Israel.” Both parents labored endlessly so that Berger and his brother could have a fighting chance in their new home (and fight the boys did, he writes, in a neighborhood full of tough Irish and Italian kids). Academically gifted, Berger went on to become a writer on education and religion for the New York Times. But his true education, to gauge by this memoir, came from his mother, whose diaries he quotes and who emerges from their pages as a sensitive, thoughtful observer of the human condition; her childhood lost to a brutal war, she would fulfill her dreams only late in life, when she entered college and earned a degree. His parents had their difficulties in contending with American realities, but they endured, leaving Berger with a twofold sense of self: on one hand the American (used to high-paying jobs and a nice home) and on the other the immigrant (who “tinges all comfort with a sense of raw peril, terror of imminent poverty, and, sometimes, shame at one’s foreignness”).
A fine addition to the literature of the Holocaust (that “permanent tribal wound, engraved on our souls”) and a good account of recent American history.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85757-X
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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