This significant Holocaust memoir of a girl hiding in Holland will be compared to Anne Frank’s diary, though it is very different. Yes, Edith went into hiding in the same city and same month as Anne Frank, and her mother even met Miep Gies, who hid the Franks. But while the Frank diary took decades to get recognized, this book (largely in diary format) was condensed by Reader’s Digest, won a literary award in England, and will be published in four other languages. Anne was also a precocious preteen, but more famous for diary entries on her family’s psychology and philosophical musings. Edith isn’t analytical, but her description is superior. In the 1940 invasion of neutral and safe Holland, for example, anti-aircraft fire is “heavy dark smoke clouds and little gray puffs, like bubbles,” and German paratroopers arrive in “hundreds of little black balloons.” Because she was, at 14, an ordinary teenager, she talks about boys, skating, school, and clothes. A very secular person with a Jewish grandmother, Edith sees herself as Jewish when Nazi laws forbid her from attending school or riding her bike. She wears the “ugly” yellow star of David as a “badge of honor” that prompts the sympathetic Dutch to say, “Keep your chin up.” As the situation deteriorates, her ailing mother and grandmother are caught by the Germans, one older brother escapes to America, and her non-Jewish father wastes away. Once the coddled baby, Edith has to spend her late teens posing as a gentile with the zur Kleinmiedes family—who already had to board Nazi officers. She can only shout her real name to the wind, thinking about deprivations like their one-egg-a-month ration and waiting for liberation. In another major difference from Anne Frank, Edith survives to double her diary’s content with adult comments. A valuable opportunity to see the situation just outside Anne’s attic.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56947-178-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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