The tale of a young Japanese woman's encounter with the West during the Meiji era—as told with unfortunately little resonance by great-granddaughter Kuno. In researching this story, Kuno not only retraced her ancestor's footsteps in the US but found a rich trove of letters and memorabilia to draw on in the Yale and Vassar archives. Sutematsu, daughter of an impoverished samurai who'd supported the shogun against the emperor, was a young participant in the 1868 siege that ended the shogunate. Four years later, the 11-year-old Sutematsu and five other girls left Japan to be educated in America. Their education was funded by the imperial government, which had embarked on a program of rapid modernization, but this support didn't reflect any official embrace of women's equality but, rather, the ``dubious premise that intelligent women would become intelligent mothers and intelligent mothers must give birth to children as equally endowed with brains.'' Sutematsu was fortunate to be placed in the New Haven home of the Rev. Leonard Bacon, a noted abolitionist and preacher, where she became a beloved member of the family and formed lifelong friendships. Kuno records the young woman's successes in high school; her even more luminous time at Vassar, where she was class valedictorian; and her poignant reentry into Japanese society. Recalled home by the government in 1882, Sutematsu soon realized that Japan wasn't ready for an emancipated woman. She married Japan's army minister, a much older but cosmopolitan and enlightened man, in order to work behind the scenes to realize her ambition of educating women—which she did by helping to establish the nation's first school of English and higher learning for Japanese women. A rather perfunctory introduction that only hints at the implications and pathos of Sutematsu's story. Sutematsu and her brave companions deserve more, but this is at least a long overdue beginning. (Twenty-six b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 4-77001-638-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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