A detailed examination of a Holocaust victim’s life and a considerate, thought-provoking look into why Holocaust narratives...
Kroll comes from a close-knit Jewish family in postwar London, and in her debut memoir, she traces her ancestors’ migration from Eastern to Western Europe before World War II.
In searching for her family’s lost history, Kroll becomes particularly interested in her great-uncle Benjamin, whose striking portrait captivates her. He’s her beloved grandmother’s brother, though her family is unaware of his fate. After years of searching, she discovers that he died at Auschwitz in 1943, but the fact of his death doesn’t provide closure; on the contrary, it sparks her curiosity. She becomes determined to uncover as much as she can about Benjamin and his family. Her quest takes her to Paris, where Benjamin was living when he was captured by the Nazis; Poland, where she tours Auschwitz; and Israel, where she’s moved to tears at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. Kroll’s prose is eloquent and evocative, and her writing is admirably self-aware. At times, she acknowledges that her family might think she’s obsessed with a ghost, and she wonders if she is, in fact, too rooted in the past. But the goal of her writing is both clear and incredibly important. Benjamin’s life story—his normal prewar life, his family’s separation and his time in a concentration camp—is, like many real-life narratives, a paradox: remarkable and riveting without being terribly original. Yet the point of Kroll’s work isn’t to put forth an untold or unusual story; she tells Benjamin’s tale “to elevate him from a mere number—the number tattooed on his arm in Auschwitz.” In doing so, she realizes that she’s helping, decades later, to “negate the Nazi doctrine of dehumanizing their victims.”
A detailed examination of a Holocaust victim’s life and a considerate, thought-provoking look into why Holocaust narratives are important.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1771800075
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Iguana Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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