A subtly compelling, fast-paced memoir of the Nazis' coming to power, told from the point of view of a perceptive child. In this second book, a childhood memoir, Durlacher describes growing up in the German town of Baden-Baden from 1933 through 1936. He masterfully captures the eerie unreality of the initial years of Nazi rule with painful clarity. Before Hitler becomes chancellor, the boy recalls doing normal things, like being fitted for a sailor suit, lighting Chanukah candles, watching his parents dress elegantly for a New Year's ball. But later his neighbors cheer the demonic men wearing brown shirts and helmets who march through the streets under flags with swastikas. He looks on admiringly as his aunt defies the Brownshirts, scrubbing away the stars of David painted on the outside of the family furniture store. One feels the increasing aura of menace that alters this boy's world: The windows of the hotel of friends of his family are smashed; his mother's non-Jewish cleaning lady, whom he adores, stops coming to their house; his father loses his business clients; the family makes plans to move to Holland. (During the war, Durlacher was incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp and later returned to Holland. Durlacher recounted his wartime experiences in Stripes in the Sky, not reviewed.) The imaginative young Durlacher sees the Brownshirts as ``devils stamp[ing] their hooves,'' led by a man on horseback who resembles ``the cruel knight'' in his book of fairy stories. Not just a moving recollection but a powerful indictment. Durlacher lays the blame for the destruction of Jewish families like his own at the feet of those ``countless Germans, indifferent or paralyzed by fear, [who] watched us drowning before their eyes.''
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-85242-282-3
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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