An affecting, brisk read, especially noteworthy for its essential optimism and accomplished turns of phrase.
An invigorating memoir about coming of age as the daughter of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors.
Taitz’s (In the King's Arms, 2011, etc.) childhood was punctuated by stories of her parents’ and grandmother’s loss as well as their faith during their time in the ghetto and Dachau. Here, the author explores her early awareness of standing out as a child; the transition from desiring assimilation to appreciating her Yiddish heritage; personal relationships; a vow to her father; travel to Israel; the differences between life on the West and East coasts; the search for meaningful work after she realized a Yale law degree did not align with her artistic impulses; study at Oxford; marriage, divorce and remarriage; and the deaths of her parents, Simon and Gita. Motifs of time, filial love, the preservation of memories and the biblical story of Queen Esther weave throughout these chapters, which also stand alone as essays that capture the spirit of the postwar decades. Taitz evokes popular culture, from the silver screen to commercial jingles, and intersperses lighter moments with deeper considerations of suffering. Though the author focuses mostly on her experiences, it is Simon and Gita’s perseverance that truly shines—the former a respected watchmaker who began life anew more than once, the latter a concert-level pianist whose dreams were thwarted by war and who rescued her own mother from the Nazis' infamous selections. Taitz portrays her parents with tenderness while acknowledging their imperfections.
An affecting, brisk read, especially noteworthy for its essential optimism and accomplished turns of phrase.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9755618-8-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: McWitty Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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