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
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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