A daughter chronicles her father’s extraordinary life, including the suffering he endured under both Nazi and Communist tyrannies.
Nachman Libeskind was largely raised in Lodz, Poland, where his Jewish parents eked out a modest living with a small grocery store. Libeskind, who had three siblings, was an infectiously happy child, obsessed with art and music. Instead of sending him to a cheder, a traditional religious school, his parents reluctantly enrolled him at the Vladimir Medem School—a much more progressive, practical academy that changed Libeskind’s life. As a teenager, he was politically active in the Bundist movement and jailed; he quickly learned the precariousness of life in Poland as a socialist and as a Jew. After Nazi Germany annexed Lodz, it became clear that he had to flee the country. He headed to the southern hinterlands of the Soviet Union, and he met his future wife, Dora Blaustein, in Uzbekistan. The two were forced to work in labor camps in Kyrgyzstan before they eventually returned to Poland. The political climate there remained perilous, with Jews subject to harassment from the Soviet secret police and anti-Semites, both seemingly ubiquitous. In 1957, Libeskind moved his family to Israel, an exciting prospect for Dora, who was reunited with family members there. Later, they all moved to New York, where Libeskind made a name as a painter. Berkovits, Libeskind’s daughter and the author of this cinematically gripping debut biography, does a masterful job weaving together a coherent narrative, culled largely from tape recordings that her father left behind. She has a rare gift for storytelling, and along the way, she intersperses her own, first-person accounts of her father as she knew him (“I remember the first time we talked about my father’s imprisonment when I was a young teenager and felt that somehow he wasn’t telling me the whole story”). Overall, the prose is lively and direct, and the story is deeply affecting. Sometimes, the author’s tendency to leap forward and backward in time is a touch disorienting, but this is a minor quibble when balanced against the work’s virtue as a whole.
A moving tale that’s emotionally powerful and historically edifying.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77112-066-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | JEWISH | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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