Frightening, inspiring, and cautionary in equal measure.
Going through her late grandmother’s closet yielded discoveries in a shoebox that propelled the author on a decadeslong pursuit through her family’s history before, during, and after the Holocaust.
Guardian columnist Freeman (Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies (and Why We Don't Learn Them From Movies Anymore), 2016, etc.) returns with a highly personal, thoroughly and lovingly researched tale of her family. The members of the family Ghlas (the spelling then) fled when the Nazis began to sweep through Eastern Europe; they settled in France, thinking they were safe. They weren’t. One sister escaped to America, but the rest remained; some hid, and some were arrested (one died in Auschwitz). All were in deadly danger. To conduct her impressive research, the author traveled everywhere relevant: former homes, prison camps, and homes of survivors who could add to the stories. Along the way, Freeman discovered many remarkable things about her grandmother’s generation. One sibling became a noted fashion designer; another pioneered the use of microfilm; another (the one who fled to America) married an American and never got to realize her dream of returning to live in France. Throughout, the author provides thrilling tales of escape, near misses, arrests, deportations, resistance, and betrayals. After the war, members of the family stayed in France but never forgot the way some of their French neighbors had eagerly denounced Jews to the Nazis. Freeman made a host of other astonishing discoveries: One sibling became friends with Chagall and Picasso; the microfilm sibling made a fortune. Freeman’s technique is chronological, as she follows one sibling and then shifts to another, which allows readers to learn all the stories. All are gone now—Freeman includes a poignant chapter about the death of each—and she concludes with stories (including her own) about the subsequent generations.
Frightening, inspiring, and cautionary in equal measure.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9915-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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