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
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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