A captivating recollection that’s filled with novelistic drama.
In this memoir, the last in a trilogy, a woman escapes war-torn Europe and begins a new life, filled with books and romance, in the United States.
Zebroski (Mephisto Waltz, 2014, etc.) was born in 1934 in Latvia. Her family had already known great adversity: Her maternal grandparents, Baltic Germans, had fled Russia when the revolution broke out there in 1917. When World War II erupted, her family was yet again threatened by Soviet invasion, so they fled to Germany and then to Austria, narrowly missing the infamous bombing of Dresden. The author’s father eventually had no choice but to enlist—deserters would be executed—and as a result, he was later fatally wounded in the Battle of Berlin in 1945. Until she was able to make her way to the United States in 1954, the author often contended with straitened circumstances: hiding out in bomb shelters, deprived of proper nourishment and medical attention, and separated from her mother for stretches of time. Much of this memoir is devoted to her eventful romantic pursuits later on, especially after she came to America: Her first husband, Kurt, was obsessed with sex, she writes; her second husband, Alain Genko, who took her to live in France, suffocated her with his jealousy, she says. Finally, while working for General Electric, she met Edwin Zebroski, a talented research scientist, to whom she would be married for more than 40 years. She enjoyed a surfeit of romances along the way, the most memorable being Oscar, a man she met in Los Angeles, with whom she fell rapturously in love and would remain so. The author also doggedly pursued her education, eventually studying English and child psychology at San José State University and later successfully realizing her dream of becoming a published author. Zebroski’s story is deeply inspirational—once a starving refugee, she finally got a university degree and later became a successful real estate investor and writer, ending her family’s tortured legacy of imperilment. She writes with startling, confessional candor throughout, and she’s unafraid to forthrightly discuss her missteps as well as her accomplishments. The prose is unfailingly clear, and it affectingly depicts her desire to make a permanent home in the United States instead of succumbing to a fugitive mentality. “The journey of sorting out my memories gave me purpose,” she writes. “Yes, I can do it. Find my place in the world I had chosen to live in and was fortunate to get to.” At the heart of this gripping remembrance is the author’s sense of romanticism, which is expressed in her pursuit of both men and education, and it’s indicative of a remarkable will to avoid becoming cynical, which any reader might reasonably expect. She also furnishes a perspicacious commentary on the tumultuous cultural upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, discussing such topics as the Vietnam War, the rise of the counterculture, the promiscuous use of drugs among her youthful contemporaries, and the sexual revolution.
A captivating recollection that’s filled with novelistic drama.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-978241-48-0
Page Count: 470
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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