A beautifully written memoir with a spellbinding immediacy.
A haunting coming-of-age memoir by a woman who survived the traumatic experiences of war, internment in a Nazi labor camp and life as a displaced person with her faith in humanity intact.
Saporito wrote the book with her American husband, Donald, who saw it to completion after her death in 2007. They were married in 1958, two weeks after meeting in Colorado. The author began her memoir in 1967, when Vietnam brought back painful memories of her own wartime experiences, and she continued writing it sporadically thereafter. The daughter of aristocratic white Russians who moved to Yugoslavia (where she was born in 1928), Saporito enjoyed a privileged existence as part of an elite, tightknit Russian circle until the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941. In contrast to the idyllic security of her early years, the author writes in detail about the disintegration of her family under the stress of the war and their virtual abandonment of her. Torn between the Soviet and German armies, the older generation of émigrés turned toward Germany, despite Nazi atrocities. Her parents and their friends made the hard decision to immigrate to Austria and seek refuge. That gamble failed, and they were sent to a Nazi slave labor camp. With the prodding of her parents and home tutoring, Saporito had become proficient in language, a survival skill her mother had insisted on as insurance against the possibility of future hard times. This turned out to be prescient. At the age of 16, Saporito was sent, against her will, to make her way alone to Austria. She was protected by a young German lieutenant, but he was killed by an Allied bomb before her eyes, and she also landed in the camp. Her language skills proved useful; after the Allied victory, Saporito found work as a translator with the Allied occupation forces.
A beautifully written memoir with a spellbinding immediacy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61234-633-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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