A memorable family story, full of vivid atmosphere and stirring incidents.
The “religiously and historically turbulent landscape of Jews and Christians in the century of the Holocaust” is explored in this tale of twin brothers (of different faiths) living through the wartime turmoil in Hungary—as narrated by one of their sons.
It was a not uncommon for Hungarian Jews to convert to Catholicism in pre-WWI Europe, even though it “was certainly a prosperous and creative era for Jews in Hungary.” Psychologist Pogany’s grandparents became devout Catholics at this time, and they raised their two boys—Gyuri (later to become George) and Miklos (the author’s father)—as such. George became a priest and was in Italy when WWII erupted. He took sanctuary in a monastery, but there was no port in the storm for Miklos, trapped in Budapest, who was considered a Jew by the state authorities and was packed off to Bergen-Belsen along with his wife. Pogany’s family history proceeds through those desperate days, the years of roving afterwards in search of a homeplace, and the contentious relationship of the brothers as they stake out ethical terrain and justification for their subsequent cultural and religious beliefs—George remaining a Catholic, Miklos reverting to Judaism. Pogany tells the story of these men from their own perspective, inhabiting their thoughts and shaping words for them—which is powerfully atmospheric but given to a sameness of tone and a disturbingly similar call-and-response to spiritual questions, regardless of their differing paths. Despite these shortcomings, however, Pogany does evoke with concision and pathos what life was like in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century and for the next 50 years.
A memorable family story, full of vivid atmosphere and stirring incidents.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88538-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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