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 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
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