Art critic and novelist Weisgall (Still Point, 1990), whose father and grandfather were distinguished Czech-Jewish composers, writes a sentimental memoir of her upbringing in an emotionally overcharged artistic family. Ideals of music drive the memoir. Weisgall descends from generations of composers of synagogue music. Her father, Hugo, marked a turn toward the secular in the operas he wrote (Six Characters in Search of an Author, among others) but for years led the choir at the Baltimore synagogue where his own father, Adolph (“Abba”), was cantor, and where the family’s liturgical melodies dominated. The memoir opens with a precocious Deborah at Passover service and closes as Deborah, now grown, tours ancestral Prague, the city that symbolizes her parents’ lost world of high culture and art. Music is Abba’s dignity, and Hugo’s solace in his tempestuous marriage. In the shape of the family’s liturgical compositions, it represents as well Deborah’s goal to “claim the songs of her fathers” by singing them as part of a synagogue choir, a hope she realizes—against Judaism’s traditional bias toward male service leaders—in the book’s epilogue. Unfortunately, Weisgall has not achieved enough distance from her earlier self to represent it critically, a condition of autobiography that wins a reader’s sympathy. The tone of the author’s adolescent self-assessment—“I had never thought of myself as anything but perfect”—never quite yields to a more mature voice. This shows up most glaringly in her account of a Yom Kippur service she attended away from home: her histrionic reaction to the Reform liturgy practiced there (“awful and ugly”) wants critique. Instead, Weisgall turns the remembered reaction uncritically toward sentimental affirmation of her family’s own musical traditions. The decision for sentiment cuts off any larger reflection the memoir might have inspired on, say, the relation between Judaism and secular or even Christian art (which her family holds in high esteem). A missed opportunity for critical self-reflection.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-87113-758-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
