A stirring meditation on survival and preserving one’s identity in the midst of cultural dislocation.
A Hungarian woman’s debut remembrance of her journey from Holocaust survivor to public witness.
Author Lyon’s early childhood was nearly idyllic; as one of six siblings in a Jewish family, she was raised in the rural Czechoslovakian town of Velky Berehi, a small, tightly knit community where Jews and gentiles lived in peaceful harmony. However, the 1938 Munich Agreement, signed when the author was 8 years old, ceded control of part of Czechoslovakia, including the author’s hometown, to Hungary—a grim turning point in the young girl’s life. Hungary was allied at the time with Nazi Germany, and anti-Semitism was common. The government assigned the author a new first name, Hajnal, and renamed her town, as well. After the Germans arrived as conquerors in 1944, they deprived her family of its livelihood and made all Jews wear identifying yellow stars. Lyon was eventually shipped to the Ghetto Beregszász before being sent to the infamous concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was imprisoned at seven different camps until she was rescued in 1945 by the Swedish Red Cross and sent to live with a loving host family in Sweden for two years. Then she reunited with some of her family members in the United States, where she met her husband, Karl Lyon, with whom she later had children. What little remained of her Hungarian kin was now behind the Iron Curtain, and it took relentless petitioning of the Soviet Union before she was granted permission to visit them again. The author’s recollection is as emotionally wide-ranging as it is historically astute, and her account of forced alienation from her own culture and religion is engaging. The author became a prolific public lecturer on the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and her unflinching sense of moral purpose enlivens her entire memoir. Much of the story is heart-wrenching and thus difficult to read, but Lyon manages to leaven her work with wit and inspiration. There’s no shortage of first-person accounts of the Holocaust available today, but this one serves as an able reminder of the urgent necessity of returning to the past with eyes wide open.
A stirring meditation on survival and preserving one’s identity in the midst of cultural dislocation.Pub Date: May 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5144-5505-0
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
