A heartfelt account of a family fractured by war and its awful aftereffects.
In her first book, former Utne Reader editor in chief Madison comes to terms with her father, a scarred veteran who waited until the day before he died at 78 to tell her he loved her.
Taken prisoner in July 1950, just after his arrival in Korea, U.S. Army Medical Corps Capt. Alexander Boysen remained captive for 38 months and 12 days. The author gradually fills us in on the ghastly details of her father’s captivity, interleaving those chapters with her own memories of an oppressive household dominated by the aloof, unpredictable “Doc.” Growing up on a succession of Army bases, she and her younger brothers endured the common parental admonitions about cleaning your plate and not talking back. But these, and lectures about loyalty, grooming, trust, and modesty, were all delivered with a peculiar intensity and enforced with disproportionate discipline. Not until his death did Madison begin to understand the reasons why. Relying largely on accounts of her father's fellow prisoners, a scrapbook kept by her mother, and a manuscript Doc authored, the author pieces together the full, horrific dimensions of her father’s imprisonment in a series of North Korean camps: forced marches through winter weather, rifle butts to the back and shoulders, pistol shots to the head, frozen feet, filth, lice, malnutrition, widespread infections, disease, and death. Only 27 when captured, Doc learned why some men lived and others died. He set about “force-feeding hope,” intentionally disrupting the lethal cycle that began with the loss of personal pride and too often ended in pitiful death. He became a hero to the men in his care. After his ordeal, he enforced the same code with his family. To his children, the strict regimen and the reign of fear and force were simply baffling and sometimes cruel. Madison’s vivid childhood vignettes demonstrate that decades before PTSD became an accepted diagnosis, her father continued to fight a war that for him never really ended.
A heartfelt account of a family fractured by war and its awful aftereffects.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8166-9877-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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