Sometimes reading like official government propaganda for the 50th anniversary of Israeli statehood, Bar-Zohar’s collection of paeans to Zionist sacrifice and courage nonetheless forms an impressive statement about a beleaguered people’s will to exist. A bestseller in Israel, Bar-Zohar’s anthology of biographical essays covers a century of brave actions. Heroes before the founding of the State of Israel include soldier and pioneer Joseph Trumpeldor, whose celebrated quotation “It is good to die for our country” has echoed down through Israeli history. Other “trailblazers” of the years 1897—1939 and wartime heroes 1939—1947 are Sarah Aronson of the underground organization known as NILI; British captain Orde Wingate, who told his men, “You are the first soldiers of the Jewish army”; Hannah Senesh, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Hungary; and the Warsaw Ghetto fighter Morechai Anielewicz. To the anthology’s credit, both women and men are represented, as well as non-warrior’s (like Janusz Korczak, the “father to orphans” who perished in Treblinka death camp) and the little-known, like Meir “Zaro” Zorea, the farmer turned reluctant fighter and politician, who is Israel’s equivalent of the emperor Cincinnatus. Most of the writers of these biographical sketches are familiar, and several are major war heroes and/or political leaders, including Raful Eitan, Itzhak Navon, Shevach Weiss, Itzhak Shamir, Uzi Narkiss, Zevulun Hammer, Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, Chaim Herzog, Ezer Weizmann, Ehud Barak, Avigdor Kahalani, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Some of the author-subject match-ups are intriguing, such as having Shimon Peres write about Entebbe rescue hero Yoni Netanyahu, who’s brother (Benjamin) beat Peres at the polls. The reader who makes it through these 50 biographies gets a front-row view of the struggles and sacrifices that have contributed to Israel’s improbable survival. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-52358-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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