An intriguing project—the tracing of the long shadow cast by the Holocaust on a Jewish Everyboy—but very unevenly executed.
Kaufman’s (Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, 1999) grim memoir of a life defined by feelings of victimhood, traced chiefly to his mother—a survivor of the Nazi occupation of France.
Kaufman’s tone is made clear at the outset, when he immediately plunges into his early recollections of being beaten mercilessly with a wire coat hanger by his mother. His father offers no quarter; an abrasive, emotionally distant man, he doesn’t do much besides watch TV and avoid interaction with his family. Much space is devoted to the daily dangers of living in an edgy Bronx neighborhood and the various miseries of poverty. We do get to see the author grow from a soft, fat victim into a more self-assured, football-playing bruiser, but aside from the relief at seeing his beatings end, there is little pleasure in watching; he never achieves any kind of perspective on his wretchedness. The high points of his story come when he’s able to turn his pen to subjects other than anti-Semitism or his relations with his parents. An account of his first trip to the Hudson River (in which the young Kaufman is able, finally, to get a breath of fresh air) is one of a handful of magical moments scattered throughout. His bar mitzvah, conversely, was another opportunity for his parents to disappoint him (culminating in their discarding the 20 invitations they told him they’d send out)—but it provides him with yet another occasion to draw a scathing portrait of his thuggish extended family. The final few chapters are dedicated to a series of truncated essays about adult adventures—living on a kibbutz, recovering from alcoholism in San Francisco, and visiting Dachau. The memoir as a whole might have been given more balance had the author had dedicated more pages to these exploits—and fewer to his high-school football.
An intriguing project—the tracing of the long shadow cast by the Holocaust on a Jewish Everyboy—but very unevenly executed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88064-252-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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