Eminently readable and largely remarkable.
Karmi’s debut, a matter-of-fact memoir focusing on his ordeals in Nazi concentration camps, strikes a relatively upbeat chord largely discordant with works by other Holocaust survivors.
Born into a Jewish family in the then-Hungarian city of Satu Mare, a young Karmi grows up in a country that is increasingly hostile to its Jewish population. With Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the hostility becomes a matter of official policy; despite his valiant service to Austria-Hungary in World War I, David’s father’s foreign heritage results in the family’s expulsion to Poland. There, the Karmis attempt to bunk with unhelpful relations, then undertake great risks to return to Satu Mare, only to find their home and possessions seized. Soon the family is deported once again, this time to Auschwitz, where young David is separated from his parents and sister amid horrific rumors of their likely fate. David survives not only Auschwitz, but a transfer to a second camp in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto and then a death march to Dachau in Germany as the Allied armies close in. The author ascribes his improbable endurance to the fact that he never gave up hope—he writes in an afterword, “I always look forward to tomorrow and try to forget yesterday”—and indeed, the book lacks the tonal despair employed by fellow survivors such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, instead echoing the optimism of Anne Frank’s pre-camp diaries. But perhaps just as important to David’s survival as his sunny outlook are his quick wits, good fortune and knack for making the right kinds of friends—ranging from fellow inmates who share his pluck to a sympathetic Wehrmacht lieutenant who even invites David out of the camp to his family’s home for meals. Though Karmi’s narrative loses steam once he details his post-war emigration to Palestine, his prose moves along at a respectable clip and rarely lingers on trivial details, until a handful of later chapters profiling Karmi’s successful but relatively dull American real-estate career.
Eminently readable and largely remarkable.Pub Date: July 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615412955
Page Count: 280
Publisher: D.K. Montague
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Disarming tales from a frontier doctor, an appealing old coot who actually considers himself a mere mortal. The year is 1949. Young Dr. Ron Losee has piled his wife and child into an army-surplus jeep and pointed it at Ennis, Mont., a wee burg hard by the foot of the Tobacco Root Range. What follows are the trials and tribulations of a GP forced to handle all manner of catastrophes, large and small, with a wing and a prayer and a sharp knife. Losee has a smart take on his profession: ``Doctoring should not be a business, and I think that the surgeon who operates needlessly, as it were, possesses the morality of a rapist.'' He charges each incident with enough drama to draw the reader in like blood to a cotton swab. Fractures are set; hot appendixes snipped; laryngectomies, stitchings, lancings, and bilateral castrations performed; an arm removed with a hacksaw. His theater of operations is an army cot illuminated by an old car headlight. His mistakes and failures are confessed and serve to humanize him; so do his wrenching losses, as when a child dies, and her father, dazed and confused, begs the nurse not to throw the body out with the trash. For a break, Losee shuttles off to Montreal to attend a residency in orthopedic surgery. He returns to Ennis, now with a hospital of its own, and starts to specialize in knee work, gaining a modest reputation in the process. Most of the stories hereafter revolve around lateral, medial, and cruxial ligaments, but the humor shines right through all the bloody tissue. Get this guy to a biochemist and have him cloned. As a memoirist, he's just fine; as a physician, we could use a few more thousand just like him. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1994
ISBN: 1-55821-323-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Though the Gallos' wines might repulse you and their reputation give you the willies, their autobiography is worth a look, if only to get another side of the picture. Without too much pain, the brothers Gallo (with Henderson, And The Sea Will Tell, not reviewed) get past their aw-shucks-work- hard-and-get-anywhere drapery to their nuts-and-bolts shtick: control and marketing (with a nod to hard work, like 120-hour weeks and an annual six months on the road). Marketing: Gallo wine is where it is today—the number-one seller in America—because the brothers got their goods into the hands of savvy distributors, folks who got the wine at eye-level in supermarkets across the land and fused Bartles & James wine coolers into the national retina via television. Control: Need a decent glass supplier? Build a glassworks. Having competition trouble? Slash your prices and crush the buggers. Certain problems are tactfully ignored, like those surrounding Thunderbird, a Gallo-produced down-and-outer's wine rumored to have been marketed by strewing the bottles along skid rows to give the fortified concoction a high profile. Other problems are glossed over: The Gallos' controversial (some might say fascistic) treatment of labor is couched in terms of conflicts between unions (the Teamsters vs. the United Farm Workers). But there is a wealth of background material: family travails, like the murder/suicide of the brothers' parents; Depression days when they sold bulk lots of grapes at railroad sidings; the formation of trade organizations; Julio's obituary for his son Phillip, another suicide, which is enough to break your heart; children spurning the family business; and a vision of Gallo in the 21st century. Whether or not you buy into this version of the Gallo story, it's a family saga with all the makings of a television miniseries: adversity, intrigue, tragedy, manipulation, greed, and a slick presentation. (60 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8129-2454-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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