Bittersweet rise and decline of the great French movie star Simone Signoret (1921-85), by a writer for Paris's Nouvel Observateur. David improvises in a gaga style, telling us that the writing has been ``a long daydream in which I took over Simone's memories like a squatter.'' The author managed to get one interview with Signoret at the end of her life, and a half hour with an untalkative Yves Montand, Signoret's second and last husband. The actress was born in Wiesbaden to a Jewish French Army officer who had married a German, and she was raised in comfort. Back in France, her father became a multilingual translator whose many travels away from home fed her growing self-reliance. During the Nazi occupation, she became secretary to the editor of a collaborationist newspaper, Les Nouveaux Temps, who was shot by a French firing squad after the war. Signoret got into films by playing bits and extras, and she had a daughter by Yves Allegret, the director who launched her to stardom. Her most memorable roles in France were as the tart in La Ronde, the blond in Casque d'Or, the stony-faced murderess in Les Diaboliques, and the adulteress in ThÇräse Raquin. In 1949, Signoret met then-music-hall singer-dancer Montand and life was never the same. The night she won an Oscar for her role in Room at the Top, Montand sobbed in his seat beside her- -but he was already into his scandalous affair with Marilyn Monroe. That wound never healed, says David, and Signoret, defiantly, began aging. Alcohol and Gaulois did the rest, with the actress growing fat, wrinkled, bad-tempered, and half-blind, while Montand had his mistresses. Long politically active, Signoret died at age 64. Far, far less fulfilling than Signoret's own Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be (1972) or Montand's You See, I Haven't Forgotten (1992). (Twenty-two b&w photos—not seen)
Pub Date: June 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-87951-491-4
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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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