I WAS A CHILD OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

Name: I WAS A CHILD OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
Author: Bernice Eisenstein
ISBN: 1-59448-918-1

by Bernice Eisenstein & illustrated by Bernice Eisenstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 17, 2006

Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, with which it is likely to be compared (and hold up well in the bargain), Eisenstein’s memoir is...

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String Hebrew-language chicken tags together, and you’ll discover that the word “kosher” spells “Jew” sideways. So this brilliantly conceived child’s-eye view of the Shoah generation reveals—to name just one mystery unraveled.

The faux-naïve drawing that accompanies the revelation in Torontonian artist/editor/writer Eisenstein’s debut book, incidentally, proves that point, just as the other drawings in this richly illustrated graphic book open windows on a world once very much in danger of disappearing. The adult Eisenstein, who turns up from time to time to remark on her younger self, has the language and self-awareness to consider herself something of a “Jewish Sisyphus, pushing history and memory uphill, wondering what I’m supposed to be.” Her younger self wonders about other things: her mother’s worries and fears, her father’s anger. At eight years old, she is introduced to The Diary of Anne Frank and falls under the spell of the swastika, asking her sister how to draw one, as if daring to conjure up the devil; when the devil does not appear, she and her sister agree on one thing: to keep the whole thing a secret from their parents. Her father has secrets, too, even a semi-secret life centered on poker, for here, he is a Hall of Fame master of the art of korten shpiling. Her mother has memories carefully kept hidden, which she unveils in a surprising tape-recorded interview for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. “You’d think if you put people together in such terrible conditions, they would eat each other up,” she recalls. “No—we fed ourselves with white lies of hope.” Page after page, anecdote after sketch, Eisenstein teases out an affecting portrait.

Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, with which it is likely to be compared (and hold up well in the bargain), Eisenstein’s memoir is an ultimately hopeful act, enshrining ordinary people so that they will not be forgotten, wrinkles and warts and secrets and all.

Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2006

ISBN: 1-59448-918-1

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)