by Bina Kozuch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 20, 2018
An idiosyncratic but effective book that delivers hard memories and traditional recipes from a lost Europe.
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An author novelizes her mother’s experiences during the Holocaust in this biographical debut.
Kozuch’s mother, Cipora, was born into a Jewish family in Ruscova, Romania, in the early 1930s. Narrating in the voice of Cipora, the author tells how the girl was raised helping her own mother collect and prepare food for the family table: gathering fruit, pickling vegetables, milking cows, baking matzo for Passover. Her father worked with food as well, as a kosher supervisor for a wealthy local family. After increasingly severe anti-Semitic laws curtailed the rights of Jews in Romania, the Nazis came to power and began their program of extermination. Cipora and her family were forced to relocate to the Falchovitcho ghetto and then, soon after, to Auschwitz-Birkenau: “One hundred and fifty thousand Jews from Maramures, Romania entered the camp. One hundred and forty six thousand Jews from this county were murdered, among them my immediate family: Papa, Mama, my sister Haya, and my brother Mendele.” Interspersed with Cipora’s account are recipes from her later life as the chef at a Cleveland synagogue: traditional Jewish and Romanian recipes like hamantashen cookies, caizee latkes, and hyneer paprikash. While splicing recipes into a very upsetting Holocaust story might at first seem incongruous, the importance of food to the family and culture of Cipora and her relatives is omnipresent, especially when their access to staples becomes limited: “Mama tried to invent different dishes from the peels of rotten vegetables she found in one of the garbage cans located not far from the house. We were still able to indulge in two slices of black bread a day.” The work is short, just over 100 pages (and that includes some two dozen recipes), but that is enough to capture the harrowing memories of Cipora, who told them to the author only after many decades of silence. The resultant book is a unique work of horror and history, food and heritage. Perhaps more, it’s a reminder of the things that get passed down from mother to daughter, the items that get withheld, and the ways that daughters attempt to pay their mothers back.
An idiosyncratic but effective book that delivers hard memories and traditional recipes from a lost Europe.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-543-93985-9
Page Count: 129
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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