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
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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