A deeply felt story and a sobering reminder of the long shadows of the Holocaust.
A searing survivor’s tale told by a son.
This English language debut by Swedish writer and TV personality Rosenberg is both a personal journey and a son’s letter to a loving father, David, who survived Nazi Germany but never got over it. Drawing on both historical research and family documents, the author re-creates the life of a Polish Jew who saw his hometown turned into a barbed wire hell in which 200,000 people, including his father and brother, lost their lives. Throughout the book, Rosenberg tries to picture what David saw and heard: Was he there when Jewish leader Chaim Rumkowski told the gathered throng that he had reached a bargain with the Nazis and only sick people and small children would be liquidated? David was sent to Auschwitz, which he survived only to spend the last desperate days of the war at the Wöbbelin concentration camp, where Nazis tried killing off as many Jews as possible before the liberators arrived. After the war, the ambitious David and his wife settled in the Swedish factory town of Södertälje, outside of Stockholm, for what they hoped would only be a “brief stop” on the road to a bigger, brighter future. Instead, it was a dead end. David’s dreams were at constant war with his recurring nightmares. “What I realize, much later,” writes the author, “is that time after time you make a run-up toward the horizon, and time after time you fall back to earth again.” Rosenberg was constantly asking his father why: Why this direction and not that one? Why didn’t you follow through on your dreams? It isn’t until the devastating ending that we see just why these questions loomed so large in his head.
A deeply felt story and a sobering reminder of the long shadows of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59051-607-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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