A well-illustrated but uneven account of an immigrant’s life in 20th-century America.
An Austrian immigrant recounts his intricate journey in this debut memoir.
Jeremenko, the son of Austrian refugee camp immigrants who came to America in 1951 when he was 6 years old, structures his book around a series of short vignettes drawn from his memories, supplemented with a lifetime of vivid photographs. The author’s parents were “displaced persons” who ended up as farm laborers in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The bulk of the beginning of Jeremenko’s memoir describes the “typical Americana” of his Midwest upbringing as a healthy, uproarious immigrant boy with a distant, hard-drinking father and a caring, competent mother who did all the housework, child rearing, and extensive gardening. The author grew up, got a job at the General Telephone Company, and then joined the Marine Corps. He shipped out to Vietnam, where he saw a good deal of action and lost some friends. Jeremenko recounts that this preyed on his mind even decades later (“I carry the guilt of all my team members that I lost when I was in Vietnam”). He returned to civilian life, and much of the rest of the volume consists of his accounts of growing older and having children and then grandchildren. In his heartfelt book, the author shares some intriguing details about his experiences in America and Vietnam. But his writing throughout is a bit bland, which is a drawback since the types of memories he’s relating are seldom inherently dramatic. He writes about the time his father chased local boys who were stealing fruit from the family’s garden, for instance, and about his childhood filled with rotary phones, record players, and black-and-white TVs. Unfortunately, his recollections rarely say anything striking about these things. And his frequent invocations of his passionate Christian faith can sometimes seem artificial: “Isn’t it amazing what a difference sixty-plus years makes in the planting of a small evergreen tree in our yard to remind me of Christmas year-round?” he asks at one point. “Thank you, Jesus!” The end result is a narrated family photo album—priceless to Jeremenko’s own loved ones and friends.
A well-illustrated but uneven account of an immigrant’s life in 20th-century America.Pub Date: May 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-66320-137-9
Page Count: 190
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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