A brief, intriguing memoir, by an Israeli kibbutznik, of the early years of the Nazi regime, which he witnessed as an adolescent, interspersed with accounts of his postwar struggle to come to terms with Germany and gain restitution. Tamir begins by recalling his sense of rootedness in Germany: He and his peers were as likely to sing songs of the Thirty Years' War as Zionist melodies. Indeed, his family's Jewishness was highly attenuated; his father never spoke of his East European origins and his parents observed few of the religious rituals. Yet anti- Semitism was pervasive, both pre- and post-Hitler. Particularly interesting are Tamir's descriptions of life in rural Germany in the 1930s. After his father lost his cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Tamir left home, taking a job with a sympathetic gardener. He was deported to Poland in 1938, later entering Palestine illegally. His style here is highly associative, flowing backward and forward in time and across space between Germany and Israel. Vignettes in Germany spark off memories of Palestine shortly before and during Israel's War of Independence, when Tamir's kibbutz was besieged. Like many idealistic German Jews in Israel, Tamir is sensitive to the way in which Jewish settlers, many of them driven from Europe, displaced some Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. But his attempts to weave together the passages on Israel and Germany don't quite work; the former seem more truncated and less satisfying, in terms of dramatic narrative, than the latter. Returning to postwar Germany, he encounters some predictable complacency and denial about the Holocaust, as well as some surprises. Among them: a hyper-rational German bureaucrat who, although she initially appears rigid about restitution regulations, turns out to be struggling with a sense of responsibility for Nazism and its Jewish victims. Tamir's taut, disturbing memoir derives much of its power from such stereotype-shattering individuals. A thoughtful, gripping work.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8101-1186-1
Page Count: 125
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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