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 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 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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