An emotionally powerful multigenerational memoir.
A debut memoir about “the ways the trauma of the Holocaust has reverberated through the generations of [the author’s] family.”
Frankel, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, focuses first on his maternal grandparents, who not only managed to survive the Nazi death camps, but also thrived, on the surface at least, after their arrival in the United States a few years after the end of World War II. They settled in New Haven, Connecticut, where they ran a jewelry store specializing in watch repair. As the author learned incremental details about their experiences, his respect and adoration for his grandparents only grew. The dominant character in the family chronicle, however, is Frankel’s mother, Ellen, a functional career woman but emotionally unstable individual. Ellen grew up understandably marked by the survival saga of her parents, and Frankel speculates about how being the devoted daughter of Holocaust survivors affected Ellen. “All of the drama, the volatility, hardly seemed Mom’s fault,” he writes. “She was, I knew, at the mercy of her emotions, subject to their fickle swings.” The author also looks inward to determine what his family’s experiences mean for him as a Jew growing up in a less perilous environment. For students of American politics and history, Frankel’s apprenticeship with John F. Kennedy confidant Ted Sorensen and later work for Obama provide welcome relief from the otherwise relentless emotional roller coaster. Frankel’s marriage and fatherhood add further poignancy to the narrative, and his well-delineated portraits of his cousins, aunts, uncles, and their extended families provide helpful context to the dramatic family saga. It’s a unique addition to the literature of personal accounts that keep the memory of the Holocaust alive at a time when it is “getting harder to teach young people about [it] because the most compelling instructors—survivors—are all passing away.”
An emotionally powerful multigenerational memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-225858-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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