An affecting recollection of a life rich in literature and love.
A poet reflects on her long marriage and struggle to define her own career.
In a graceful, engaging memoir, Schulman (English/Baruch Coll., CUNY; Without a Claim, 2013, etc.)—former poetry editor of the Nation, director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and winner of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry—writes candidly about her marriage to virologist Jerome Schulman, her literary aspirations, and her grief following her husband’s recent death. She takes her title from lines by Marianne Moore, describing marriage as “that strange paradise / unlike flesh, gold, or stately buildings / the choicest part of my life.” Schulman met Moore when she was 14, the beginning of a warm friendship. She edited an authorized edition of Moore’s poems and focused on her work in her doctoral dissertation. Many other poets, writers, and artists make appearances as Schulman recounts the trajectory of her career. These include novelist Richard Yates; poets W.S. Merwin, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott; critic Irving Howe; and many of the acclaimed writers—e.g., James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and Octavio Paz—Schulman invited to the 92nd Street Y. Much of the memoir focuses less on her marriage than her achievements in the literary world. Schulman married reluctantly, fearful of giving up her independence, but her husband never failed in encouraging her to write and submit her work for publication; she chafed, though, at being dependent on his income as she embarked on her career, and her resentment “seeped into our marriage like smoke.” With their discovery of Jerome’s infertility and their inability to talk frankly about adoption, the marriage foundered, leading to a 10-year separation. “My marriage,” she admits, “has been a feast of contradiction: radiance and dissatisfaction; intense loyalties and devastating treacheries; freedom and the sacrifice, albeit willing, of independence; excitement and a kind of pleasant boredom.” They reunited only to then face Jerome’s illness and a heart attack, followed by years of suffering and deterioration.
An affecting recollection of a life rich in literature and love.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-885983-52-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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