by Esther Safran Foer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2020
A vivid testimony to the power of memory.
A family’s mysteries inspire a search into a dark past.
In the novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer invented the journey of a 20-year-old Jewish American man who travels to a town in Ukraine in search of his family’s past, particularly for the woman he believed saved his grandfather from Nazi persecution. The novel had roots in his own family’s history, which Foer’s mother excavates in her moving literary debut, a recounting of her own real-life quest to uncover facts about her assorted relatives who fled from the Nazis. Her life, she writes, has been “haunted by the presence of absence”: the silence surrounding her family’s experiences before they arrived in the U.S. in 1949. She knew that her mother had wandered through Russia for three years and her father had been hidden by a Christian family. But she was stunned when her mother remarked that he had fled after Nazis had murdered everyone in his village, including his wife and daughter. The revelation about a half sister was shocking, but her mother could add nothing more about this first family. Foer needed to know: “I feel a great responsibility to keep the past alive.” Combing databases and archives, hiring a researcher in Ukraine, sending saliva for DNA testing, and making trips to Ukraine, the author unearthed more than she had imagined. “The more I learned,” she writes, “the more complicated the story became,” as the family’s struggles emerged from the clouds of history. She met distant cousins she hadn’t known existed, and in Ukraine, where her ancestors’ village had been obliterated, she trekked into a forest to the site of “unimaginable horror”: the mass grave of murdered Jews. Foer, who in her 60s became the director of Sixth & I, a Jewish cultural institution in Washington, D.C., sees her “side career as the family connector,” an undertaking in which her husband and sons have enthusiastically participated. “Traumatic memories,” she writes, “live on from one generation to the next.”
A vivid testimony to the power of memory.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-57598-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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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