A thoughtful meditation on the painful process of self-knowledge.
Aras’ (The Fugue, 2015, etc.) memoir recounts a tumultuous childhood and an emotional visit to an Austrian concentration camp as an adult.
The author was born in Cicero, Illinois, in 1973, a “rusted manufacturing town” that borders Chicago’s West Side, where, he says, violence was accepted as a part of ordinary life. His parents were Lithuanian refugees who’d fled Soviet occupation in 1945 and were drawn to Cicero because of its Lithuanian community and its Catholic parish. There, Aras suffered terribly under the violent despotism of his father, he says, which would haunt him well into adult life. The author realized that the account of Lithuanian history that his family taught him was a heavily “edited,” anti-Semitic one, and that, by extension, his own identity “seemed concocted, with most adults I knew participating in its composition.” He later moved to Linz, Austria, and took a job as a teaching assistant, and lived there for three years. But he couldn’t make himself visit the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial—a conspicuous reluctance that the author mines with impressive, introspective depth: “I had learned I had the consciousness of the victim and the perpetrator inside me all at once, and my suffering was the result of a war between them….I had avoided concentration camps because…I feared they’d offer one of these shades the opportunity to win out.” Aras’s remembrance is as philosophically moving as it is brief—fewer than 100 pages. Despite its brevity, the memoir’s confessional candor is profoundly affecting as Aras plumbs the depths of his tortured mind with great sensitivity and humility, as when, early on, he notes how the town of Cicero inspired a “conflicted sense of fear, sadness, concern, and bewilderment” in him. The memoir is part of the Little Bound Book Essay Series; it’s small in size—just 4 by 6 inches—and adorned with a few melancholic black-and-white photographs.
A thoughtful meditation on the painful process of self-knowledge.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947003-47-7
Page Count: 94
Publisher: Homebound Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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