Well-wrought, honest and even more ambiguous than most family histories.
Regret is the theme of this candid, complicated memoir, which chronicles New York Daily News reporter Einhorn’s visit to the Polish family that sheltered her Jewish mother during World War II.
The author went to the town of Bedzin in 2001 to investigate her mother Irena’s story of being hidden by gentiles after her parents were rounded up by the Nazis and put on a train headed for an unknown destination. As the legend went, Irena’s father, Beresh, tried to persuade his wife to jump from the train with him, but she refused. He jumped anyway and headed back to Bedzin, where he collected his baby daughter from the elderly aunt caring for her and handed over Irena to a Polish woman he knew named Honorata Skowronska. Pleading with her to keep the child safe until he could return, Beresh gave Honorata “his money, his jewelry, the deed to his factory and apartment” before being arrested and deported once again. After the war, he returned from Auschwitz, retrieved his child and emigrated to Detroit. Whether or not he ever promised Honorata that her family could have his home in Bedzin is a murky question that drives much of the memoir. Irena never dwelled on memories of Poland, but the author hoped that her trip there would help repair a fraught relationship with her difficult, demanding mother. However, shortly after Einhorn first contacted Honorata’s son Wieslaw, who remembered Irena as his “sister,” her mother died of cancer, underscoring yet again the loss of connection with the past. Running parallel with her family saga is the author’s attempt to dispel the instinctual, stereotypical antagonism she felt for the Polish generation that betrayed the Jews, while marveling at the resurgence of interest in Jewish culture she found in young Poles she met. Einhorn delicately and movingly interweaves the personal and the epic.
Well-wrought, honest and even more ambiguous than most family histories.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5830-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
