Affecting records of a world at once familiar and distant—a welcome addition to the literature of the Shoah.
A moving work of literary archaeology, rescuing Jewish texts from the oblivion of history.
“Es iz shver tsu zeyn a yid.” It’s hard to be a Jew. History has proven that countless times, with particular fury in the place New Yorkercontributing cartoonist Krimstein calls Yiddishuania. There, in 1939, a linguistic and cultural institute mounted “an ethnographic study in the guise of a meagerly funded autobiography contest.” By cruel irony, the winners were to be announced on Sept. 1, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland. The Gestapo seized many of the documents, but librarians spirited some away—and then hid them again when Stalin launched a Soviet pogrom after the war. The first essay, by an unidentified 17-year-old girl, is a record of repression: She was discouraged from reading religious and secular texts thought inappropriate for women and was forbidden from saying kaddish after her father died. Another essay recounts the efforts of a 20-year-old man who spent his time and money writing letters to Franklin Roosevelt pleading for asylum, a request that the State Department declined. Another young man questions traditional religion, not least because he was in love with a young woman who did not return the affection. “Was it because I didn’t become a Communist and start eating pork?” he wonders. “Was it because I couldn’t go to the dinner dance her socialist youth group had on Yom Kippur?” The ordinary travails of adolescence and young adulthood become more sharply pronounced against the background of descending terror. In this excellent follow-up to The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, Krimstein, whose illustrations recall both Chagall and Art Spiegelman, closes by affirming these pieces as “voices, garments, smiles, years, laughter”—in short, living documents in the face of death.
Affecting records of a world at once familiar and distant—a welcome addition to the literature of the Shoah.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-370-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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