A truly moving and bravely rendered memoir.
An impressionistic memoir of a Polish Jewish girl’s survival hiding as a Gentile in Nazi-occupied Poland.
What lifts this beautifully understated narrative above many other admirable efforts are Frankel’s gift for visceral detail and trained eye as a novelist. Smoothly translated from the Hebrew by Silverston, this memoir by the prolific children’s author and illustrator begins with one traumatic moment—one of many—in her early life. Around the age of 7, Frankel, nee Goldman, was thrust back into the care of her parents, who were hiding in a secret room in Lvov next to a sympathetic Polish carpenter and alcoholic, Juzef Juzak. The Lvov Ghetto had been liquidated in June 1943; the lucky few, like Frankel, had been fobbed off on opportunistic Poles like the cunning Hania Seremet, who took the Goldmans’ money and the mother’s gold teeth to smuggle their only daughter out of the ghetto to Seremet’s parents’ farm in Marcinkowice. Meanwhile, Frankel’s parents, who were well-meaning communists, had earned the respect of Juzak and were harbored in safety, as long as the “girl” did not come, too. The memoir moves with mannerist irony through this shattering time, and the author uses repetitive, obsessive detail to enforce the chilling effect—e.g., about the animals at the farm, the mice and the lice in the hideaway with her parents, and the stories she had to hear but did not want to hear, ending always in the depressing refrain: “That’s what my mother told me, and told me, and told me.” There is almost no other way to tell this powerful story, as the family waited for the Red Army to liberate them from the Nazis and then later had to flee Russian anti-Semitism.
A truly moving and bravely rendered memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-253-02228-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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