Childhood memories dominate, but the last years of his parents bring to the fore the melancholy that has been there all...
Dry, droll observations from the author’s childhood, with an undercurrent of understated sadness.
This could have been titled “Portrait of the Humorist as a Young Child,” though New Yorker cartoonist Kaplan (I Love You, I Hate You, I’m Hungry, 2010, etc.) doesn’t try too hard to be too funny. It also doesn’t fit the conventions of the graphic memoir, since it has a textual format with frequent, generally small, drawings rather than cartoon panels with words. In addition to his magazine work, the author has also shown his comic sensibility as a TV screenwriter (Girls, Seinfeld), and screens small and large are more prominent throughout these pages than any memories of development as an artist. “As I guess is obvious, I loved TV,” he writes. “I wanted to crawl in the TV and stay there permanently. I guess in a way when I grew up and became a TV writer, I finally did.” The fact that entertainment plays such a formative role in Kaplan’s life suggests how emotionally impoverished he found his family. His mother was “discombobulated” by the strains of raising three boys, while his father went off to work, his own ambitions of becoming a writer thwarted by the demands of supporting a family. The whole family seemed to make do, letting broken things remain that way, enduring their lives rather than particularly enjoying them. The author’s parents never had visitors to the house except for a neighboring couple on New Year’s Eve, when they would “bring out the plastic champagne glasses. I got Cheez-Its on New Year’s Eve. Cheez-Its represented total, utter wild abandon.” Readers of a similar background will find that these memories strike a responsive chord, along with the desire to find something less stultifying.
Childhood memories dominate, but the last years of his parents bring to the fore the melancholy that has been there all along.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-16951-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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