by Agata Tuszynska translated by Charles Ruas ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2016
A wrenching journey in search of memory and identity.
A Polish poet and historian explores her family’s tormented history.
Growing up in postwar communist Poland, Tuszynska (Vera Gran, The Accused, 2013, etc.) “rarely heard the word ‘Jew.’ Only from my father, and then, always in a mocking tone of voice.” He believed Jews were responsible “for every unpopular law, for whatever problems he currently had at work, for the scarcity of new tires for his automobile.” Her father, a sports reporter, and her mother, an editor, separated when she was 7, and the young girl blamed herself. Her father did not love her anymore, she thought; later, she learned that her mother, in love with another man, had insisted on ending the marriage. Her father was heartbroken. Revelations did not stop there: when she was 19, her mother told her that she was Jewish. Now in her late 50s, Tuszynska embarked on a search for a past kept secret from her, delving into the lives of those “sealed behind the wall, those in photographs, those in cemeteries,” and questioning her parents, both still alive, forcing them “into the difficult task of discovering the extent to which they had dissimulated their memories.” Her mother’s reticence causes the author to resort to much speculation about her feelings or thoughts. Although at times a proliferation of characters causes confusion, Tuszynska’s memoir offers an unsettling portrait of Polish Jewry in a Catholic nation. In Lodz, “the Polish Manchester,” her mother’s relatives, although they contributed to the upkeep of the synagogue, felt themselves to be Polish patriots. Only after the Nazi invasion in 1939 did many Poles become aware of “who was what” because the Germans forced Jews to wear stars. Returning to her homeland, the author was struck forcefully by enduring anti-Semitism, “the hatred, the aggressiveness,” and “the boorishness and contempt for any sort of difference.”
A wrenching journey in search of memory and identity.Pub Date: April 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-375-41370-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | JEWISH | WORLD
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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 Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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