Eskin conjectures Wilkomirski may be overidentifying with camp survivors, or deluded, or a con man, but, any which way, its...
The pathetic story of a self-proclaimed child survivor of the Holocaust upon whose story much doubt has been cast, crisply reported by journalist (and Wilkomirski family member) Eskin.
In 1996, Schocken published Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Holocaust memoir called Fragments, for that is just what it was: unadorned, brutal, and hugely compelling shards of memory, recounting a young Jewish boy’s experiences in Latvia and the concentration camps. Even before it was released, the book came to the attention of Eskin, whose family included Wilkomirskis from Riga. Eskin smelled a good story in Wilkomirski: he was invited to New York to meet his own extended Wilbur/Wilkomirski family, perhaps establish some link between families. At this point, even though Fragments was receiving much favorable publicity—from Kirkus and many others—for its raw pungency, for its powerful disjointedness and graspings to recapture a life, doubts were being raised about Wilkomirski’s account. They didn’t exactly creep in, as doubt is always present in recovered memory. They started with the very notion of a three-year-old remembering anything with any clarity. Then factual questions arose: transportation between camps didn’t happen as Wilkomirski recalls, nor did his destinations jibe with what happened to Latvian Jews; his family background was willfully obscured, then dismissed as mistaken paperwork; a whole flurry of inconsistencies slowly built to a damning amount. Eskin reports on the entire recovered-memory movement, presents the cases for and against Wilkomirski as developed by Daniel Ganzfried and Harvey Peskin et al., and its effect on child-survivor groups, makes a remarkable trip to Latvia to find family members, presents a valuable look at Holocaust-denial themes, and softens his reportorial skepticism by revealing how much he would like Wilkomirski’s behavior to have some valuable meaning.
Eskin conjectures Wilkomirski may be overidentifying with camp survivors, or deluded, or a con man, but, any which way, its one more dreadful story trailing in the poison of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04871-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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