First published in 1973 by a small Canadian press, this autobiographical debut novel, from the Montreal-based Charney, renders the extraordinary events of a childhood in post-WW II Poland in a dispassionate, affectless voice. By the time the narrator turns five, she's spent half her life in a hayloft, huddling with a group of Polish Jews who are hiding from the Germans. Now freed by a patrol of kindly Russian soldiers, the child is shocked and delighted by the world she'd forgotten: She thrills to the feeling of the wind, the fragrance of grain. Returning with her mother and aunt to Dobryd, their former hometown, they find the place in ruins but settle into what becomes a bustling community of survivors. Meanwhile, the girl's aunt reminisces about the family's former great wealth, the young anarchists and communists who kept prewar life in Dobryd lively, and the narrator's mother's desperate escape from the about-to-be- liquidated Jewish ghetto to the hayloft haven. Amid these occasionally disturbing stories, the narrator tries on life as a ``normal'' child, losing herself in play with other kids and observing with semidetachment the emotional fragility of her mother and aunt. Charney's novel covers unusual ground: It explores the possibility of happiness in a setting of devastating loss and reveals a hungry childhood spirit that seeks identity and fulfillment, despite the fact that those around her are numb with grief. This child's-eye-view of a world without innocence is momentarily arresting, but readers are kept at an enforced arm's length: While newcomer Charney successfully avoids sentimentalism, her controlled tone robs the story of its immediacy. In all, a frustratingly clinical take on a fertile subject.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-877946-66-4
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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