Balancing what the child experienced then, which was frequently devastating, with what the author knows now might have...
A memoir of repression in Romania from a child’s perspective, focusing on familial sacrifice rather than political ideals.
Though Bugan (Crossing the Carpathians, 2005) has become an accomplished poet since moving with her family to America in 1989, she generally abstains from literary flourish here as she recounts the consequences of her father’s rebellion and imprisonment. He may be the hero of his own story, but the author is “just at the edge, a ghost” within the official account. What she remembers is that “he left us to God’s will and the secret police,” the family reviled within a society of informers, her life in peril whenever she left the house, under constant surveillance when at home. “I never wanted to be part of your vision,” she told her father after his release, when he claimed that the family needed to pay a price for the greater good. Bugan’s mother, whom the state ordered to divorce her husband, “always fought with him about…his selfishness to think that it’s all right to sacrifice his family for a pointless political ideal.” Is it “pointless” and “selfish” to show resistance in the face of dehumanizing totalitarianism? Should only those without families rebel? Is such rebellion inevitably futile? These are key questions that the memoir doesn’t really address from the author’s more mature perspective and certainly couldn’t answer from a child’s perspective. In her afterword, Bugan writes of her belated access to files about her family’s life and her father’s imprisonment, information that puts their suffering in fresh light. “I will never know the whole story,” she writes. “Had I had this knowledge before I wrote this book, perhaps the voice of the child would have been strangled.”
Balancing what the child experienced then, which was frequently devastating, with what the author knows now might have resulted in even richer revelation.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55597-617-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
