by Oskar Rosenfeld & translated by Brigitte M. Goldstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2002
A singular contribution to the literature and history of the Shoah.
“Who in future times will believe that human beings fought each other over a potato?” So asks this utterly unsentimental, open-eyed, harrowing portrait of ghetto life during the Holocaust.
Born in Moravia in 1884 and long resident in Vienna, Rosenfeld was a modestly successful writer of novels and novellas when the Nazi Anschluss forced him to flee to Prague. Following the German conquest of Czechoslovakia, he was transported the ghetto of Lodz, Poland, where he was put to work in the statistics bureau established by the religious leader known as The Eldest of the Jews. Officially, and with the knowledge and permission of the Nazi overseers, Rosenfeld recorded such matters as deaths, food rations, decrees from the ghetto leadership, and reports from the Jewish police; unofficially, and certainly without authorization, Rosenfeld also kept careful notes on daily life in a makeshift society where “every potato is a building block for tomorrow.” Not surprisingly, Rosenfeld devotes many of his often elliptical entries to the lack of food and the effects thereof on the populace; he takes time, too, to note grim oddities such as the plague of flies that visited the ghetto hospital in July 1942 (“A hallway with seventeen people, one hundred flypapers with two hundred flies in one week, that’s twenty thousand flies. An interesting statistic”) and the general dirtiness of the place owing to lack of water and soap—so that, as Rosenfeld writes, God deserves a new name, “‘The one with washed hands,’ the being that I am not allowed to name because I haven’t washed my hands yet.” Elsewhere he notes the comings and goings of the ghetto’s chief Gestapo informant, an object of strange admiration, and records the rumors that sweep the community—including, ominously, one concerning the extermination in a kind of bathhouse of hundreds of Jews at a time. The rumor was true: Rosenfeld died at Auschwitz in 1944, leaving this extraordinary testimonial.
A singular contribution to the literature and history of the Shoah.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8101-1488-7
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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