A somewhat lackluster but candid and heartfelt memoir.
A writer and photographer of German descent tells the story of how falling in love with and then marrying a Jewish man changed her life.
Gendler did not expect to meet "the man of her life" three weeks after her father's death, nor did she expect he would be Jewish, just like the man her Bohemia-born great-aunt Resi had wed and then divorced to protect herself and her children from the horrors of Nazism. Yet it soon became clear that Harry, who had grown up in Germany (as had the New Jersey–born author) but carried a French passport, was someone with whom she could share interests along with “a certain sense of not belonging.” The difference in their religious backgrounds, as well as Gendler’s own unfinished business with an ex-boyfriend and Harry’s fear of upsetting a father who would say “[Kaddish], the prayer for the dead” if he discovered the relationship, made them cautious to become closer. All too aware of the obstacles that stood in their way, they hid their relationship for more than two years from everyone except close friends. A trip to Israel and, later, to various Jewish memorials around Germany with Harry led to a deepening of Gendler’s interest in Jewish culture and religion and her eventual decision to marry him and convert to Judaism. Her decision to become “part of a minority saddled with centuries of prejudice” caused painful endings to long-standing friendships. It also created tensions with Harry’s parents, who the author realized would have waged “a steady and relentless war” to keep the pair apart had they known she and Harry were dating. A move to Chicago allowed the pair a chance to build a successful marriage and life away from those who would judge them. Interwoven with the story of Gendler’s great-aunt and illustrated with family photographs, the author’s story offers an intimate and interesting—though not especially compelling—look at one woman’s life choices and their outcomes.
A somewhat lackluster but candid and heartfelt memoir.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-170-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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