A compelling account of crushing oppression, those who sought to flee it, and those who, at great risk, offered help.
The potent story of a Jewish woman who fled, hid, endured imprisonment and debasement, and eventually escaped to Switzerland in June 1943.
In a republished volume that has enduring relevance, Frenkel (1889-1975), who originally produced her long-forgotten and recently rediscovered work in 1945 (original title: No Place To Lay One’s Head), chronicles her life before and after the Nazis rose in Germany and invaded France. As the new title suggests, she was a bookshop owner. She tells about her early love for books and her decision to go into the business—and to locate that business in Berlin, where she found no shops specializing in French literature (her love). When the Nazi oppressions grew more severe in Germany, she returned to France, where conditions were tolerable—at least for a while. Then she was forced to hide with sympathetic gentile friends, but she soon realized France was no longer safe, so she resolved to escape to Switzerland. She was apprehended in the process and spent time in custody before, miraculously, a judge freed her after a brief trial. A bit later, she made a second attempt to cross the border and succeeded despite gunfire and a near recapture. Frenkel, who originally wrote the book not long after her escape, is a fine writer: detailed, emotional, and careful about giving her readers sufficient information to keep the tension taut and not overwhelm. The current edition features some useful additions, including a chronology and a “dossier,” a compilation of some research to validate what the author wrote, as well as a preface by French novelist and Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. Pictures, photocopies, and translations of documents comprise nearly 30 pages of engaging and relevant backmatter.
A compelling account of crushing oppression, those who sought to flee it, and those who, at great risk, offered help.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-50-119984-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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