Szczypiorski (The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman, 1990) reaches back to an anti-Semitic persecution in 15th-century Brabant for this allegory, first published in Poland in 1970, of the seductive appeal of totalitarianism. Three years after a plague in 1458 wiped out a fifth of its inhabitants, the Burgundian town of Arras is plunged into political frenzy by the death of a horse after its owner was allegedly cursed by his Jewish neighbor Tselus. Arrested and interrogated, Tselus kills himself before charges can be preferred, but the townspeople, seized by rabid anti-Semitism, proceed to rob, exile, and kill not only the local Jews but anyone who expresses sympathy for them, offers criticism of the new orthodoxy of hysteria, or, finally, shows any threateningly aberrant behavior: feeding Jewish citizens, debauchery, conducting scientific dissections. The parallels with the rise of Fascism are obvious, but Szczypiorski, who's after something more subtle, focuses on the running debate between Albert, the holy elder who argues first that purging the town's Jewish presence doesn't purge its evil inclinations—and then, on his deathbed, that he sought to lead the town to freedom through an experience of ``the bitterness of evil''—and the royal bastard Prince David, the absentee Bishop of Utrecht, who begins by speaking for rationality but ends by declaring a ``Sunday of Forgiveness, Cancellation, and Forgetting'' that will render the whole ugly episode null and void. The fulcrum of this debate is a lordly, sensitive student named Jan, who's torn between his loyalty to both Albert and David. Only after he himself is arrested on trumped-up charges does he find his concern for his own and the town's welfare colliding with the need for collective memory, however much in conflict it is with individual experience. But don't be put off by such an abstract summary: this is really a dramatic fable that looks back to Kafka's allegories, and behind them to Dostoyevsky's ``Grand Inquisitor.''
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1173-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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