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 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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