by Dina Elenbogen ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2015
Elenbogen occasionally illuminates important themes of identity, but there is much more to learn about these Ethiopian Jews....
Soul-searching memoir of the author’s visits to Israel and how she discovered an Ethiopian Jewish community in the process.
Elenbogen (Creative Writing/Univ. of Chicago Graham School; Apples of the Earth, 2005) chronicles the history of the Olim, Ethiopian Jews whose status was only confirmed by the Israeli rabbinate in 1973. However, since “the government was ambivalent about taking action to bring them to Israel,” their immigration did not begin until the airlifts between 1981 and 1991. The author does not focus on the stories of those who walked from Ethiopia to Sudan before being airlifted to Israel, and she offers little information about the lives of the Olim before they migrated. They are a reserved, quiet people, and since Elenbogen did not know their language, communication was strictly in Hebrew, which neither spoke well. She worked with the immigrants in what is called an absorption center, small enclaves where they are taught the ways of modernity and enriched in Israeli life. The author’s connection to one small group drives the memoir. They are separated from local populations, schools are underfunded and poorly staffed, and higher education is often unavailable. Though there is no specific suggestion of racism, they are black, and their ability to integrate is extremely difficult and not especially encouraged. There are those who blame them for their lack of drive, but they live in temporary housing with few jobs, poor leadership and no land. As Elenbogen’s friends grew, some found jobs or education; life is steadily improving but very slowly. The author’s poetic prose and descriptions of the country enhance the book, but it tends to be too self-orbiting.
Elenbogen occasionally illuminates important themes of identity, but there is much more to learn about these Ethiopian Jews. Perhaps one day one of them will tell the whole story; this is just an introduction.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-886157-97-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: BkMk/Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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