A curious study of fleshly weakness and the will to survive—and a representation certain to yield controversy.
A troubling portrait of an iconic figure of the Holocaust and his sad, secretive life during and after the Nazi era.
Lee, a biographer of Otto’s daughter (Roses from the Earth, not reviewed, etc.) and associate of the Anne Frank Trust, brings due sympathy to bear on Otto, a German Jew who had served with distinction in the Kaiser’s army, succeeded in business, but was forced out of Nazi Germany into neighboring Holland. There he established a spice-importing firm, some of whose employees were members of the Dutch Nazi Party—many Netherlanders, Lee writes, were glad to join the crusade to purge Europe of Jews; whereas the survival rate for French Jews was something like 75 percent, only 25 percent of those in the Netherlands saw the fall of the Nazi regime. A Dutch Nazi acquaintance of one of those employees began to blackmail Otto, and for a time he kept the knowledge of Frank’s secret annex to himself until someone—Lee has a strong opinion on who that was—phoned the Gestapo to betray the Frank family. Amazingly, the blackmail resumed after the war and Otto’s relocation to Switzerland. What was the basis of thug Tonny Ahlers’s hold over Otto? Lee suggests that it had to do with Frank’s collaboration with the occupying Wehrmacht, to which he sold pectin and other materiel; adultery may have figured into the matter, too, for Ahlers’s acquaintance suspected that his wife had been having an affair with Frank. Lee does not condemn Frank, though she points to some strange choices he made while editing his daughter’s famous diaries for publication, as well as his approval of a German translation that altered lines such as “only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German” to “all civilized languages . . . but softly!”—all of which brought Frank fortune, and Ahlers too.
A curious study of fleshly weakness and the will to survive—and a representation certain to yield controversy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052082-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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