“When I think about that period, I feel resentful and happy at the same time,” writes Rehbein; likewise, readers will...
Rehbein recalls the dreadful World War II years, and a few thereafter, of a German youth living in Poland.
As 1939 approached, Rehbein’s family toiled in a German farming village set amidst Ukrainian farming villages situated in Poland. As German Lutherans, they were retributive targets of the Polish government in those fraught years, and paid the price for German nationalism and bellicosity. Rehbein’s agricultural village may have been set in flowering meadows, but his voice displays a foreboding, fearful innocence of the time: “You know that if the Polish government were treating the German minority better, the thoughts of disloyalty would not need to be there.” Then the great hammer came down, and there was little but death to turn to, other than black humor, as the author was forced to resettle to the north: “Everybody had to learn how to say ‘Heil Hitler,’ and we heil hitlered a lot.” Rehbein had an intuitive distaste for injustice, and that found him on the dire end of brutality–being beaten, for instance, with a thorny stick while on the edge of starvation. It also allowed him an immediacy of recall, to remember with bitterness the everyday: “These screams were only interrupted by the pitch of their voices changing while they were being slapped or raped.” The author found solace in his possessions: a teakettle and two dirty shirts. There comes a moment when readers will think that Rehbein has simply let everything loose–“being picked for execution can be extremely unnerving”–only to have him reel them back into the soul-wasting, daily routine of a civilian prisoner of war in a Russian slave-labor camp. Still, the book contains what can only be called instances of salvation, such as Rehbein’s reunion with his parents after the war, and times of biblical wandering–“my sojourning in the bombed-out and defeated Germany.”
“When I think about that period, I feel resentful and happy at the same time,” writes Rehbein; likewise, readers will appreciate these honest accounts.Pub Date: May 26, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4196-3341-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
