The diary should appeal to readers of Keilson’s fiction but not most general readers.
The wartime diary of a celebrated novelist.
When Keilson (The Death of the Adversary, 2011) was in his 30s, he spent a period of time in hiding. In the early 1940s, the writer and psychotherapist fled to the Netherlands with his wife and daughter. But by 1944, the Netherlands had been occupied, and while his non-Jewish wife took their child to live elsewhere, Keilson acquired fake papers and moved in with the Rientsma family. During that period, the author had an affair with a younger Jewish woman, also in hiding, and composed a series of sonnets inspired by the affair; he also wrote fiction and kept a diary. Keilson’s novels were first published in English only a few years ago, to great acclaim. The diary will be of great interest to fans of his fiction. He describes the ups and downs of his passion for Gertrud, his wife, and Hanna, his mistress. Regarding Hanna and the sonnets she inspired, Keilson writes, “I have the feeling of having sucked everything out of her it’s possible to get, like out of a lemon…and then turned it into poetry.” Those sonnets are included in this volume. Searls, Keilson’s capable translator, tells us that the “poems are written in a clipped, tightly coiled German,” with “a wrought, elliptical, intense style.” Unfortunately, those tight coils don’t come across in translation; in English, the poems feel awkward—e.g., the first two lines of the first one: “I son, you daughter, children of one blood, / so bitter ripe for Death in his fierce mowing.” In the diary, Keilson also includes notes on his readings as well as speculation on what life will be like after the war. Surprisingly, he spends little time describing that war and his experience of it. “Meanwhile, heavy fighting in the Netherlands!” he writes, in late September. “Nijmegen, Arnhem!” But then, in the next sentence: “These events, however much they grip me, are no longer my real life.”
The diary should appeal to readers of Keilson’s fiction but not most general readers.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-53559-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
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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