A moving memoir coupled with a rigorous historical study.
Pila chronicles the grim experience of his Jewish parents during World War II in this nonfiction work.
The author grew up believing that his father’s name was Serge de Russ, that he was a French Catholic, and that he ultimately perished in a POW camp during WWII; this was the story he had always been told by his mother, Rosa, born Ruchla Laja Sat in Poland in 1911. However, in his twilight years (Pila is an octogenarian), he decided to research his parents’ past, and discovered that his mother’s account was thoroughly fabricated: His father was born Szapsa Russ, and, like Pila’s mother, he was a Jew native to Poland. Moreover, Szapsa did not die in a POW camp, but was arrested and sent to concentration camps; he would ultimately perish in one. With journalistic meticulousness and dramatic poignancy, the author reconstructs the experience of his parents, both of whom worked for the resistance in Belgium. As a result of the danger they faced, Pila stayed for years with his parents’ best friends, Gerard and Germaine Decraene, whom he believed, at time, were his father and mother. To conceal his Jewishness—the author was circumcised—he was disguised as a girl. Pila reflects profoundly and candidly on discovering the truth about his father and the ways in which that revelation disoriented his conception of himself: “Learning of the camps he had been in didn’t alter my sense of identity, but learning of his Judaism did. Even though I have lived my life proudly as a Jew since rejoining my mother, in terms of my sense of self, I still felt half Catholic. It’s hard to let go of a part of yourself after almost 80 years.” In addition to these introspective ruminations, Pila depicts, with unflagging realism, the barbarism of the concentration camps in which both his mother and father suffered. This is a remarkable story that thoughtfully highlights the seemingly inexhaustible reverberations of the Holocaust into the present and future.
A moving memoir coupled with a rigorous historical study.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2022
ISBN: 9789493276543
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.
A genre-bending book that grapples with the diffuse and uncategorizable enormity of personal loss.
A woman wakes alone in her guest bedroom, grieving the dissolution of her marriage to an emotionally manipulative writer. A woman returns home to her apartment, spying a pool of blood creeping under the neighbor’s door. Each woman narrates one half of Lacey’s latest literary experiment, a recursive story told in two parts: a novella and a memoir entwined with one another. The effect is unsettling, like experiencing the lost memory of a book even as you turn its pages. “I felt I’d been shrunk down and shoved into a doll’s house, and I knew then—again, or for the first time—how grief expands as it constricts, how it turns a person into a toy version of herself,” Lacey writes in the opening page of the memoir section. The “toy version of herself” might be what Lacey transposes into the novella, about a woman confronting her role in the end of her marriage while growing ever more anxious about a possible murder next door. Then again, maybe not. “Ha ha, we said, yet again someone has confused the voice of a fictional character for an authorial statement of belief,” Lacey and her husband assure one another in the memoir. Across both sections of the book, Lacey offers meditations on faith, violence, friendship, and dislocation. With scalpellike precision, she teases out connections between her childhood experiences with loving and losing God and losing her faith in love as an adult. There are no easy endings in this doubled book, just an infinity loop of questions and possibilities, a twinned bank of pay phones ringing in the night, waiting for someone to answer.
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615406
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
A host of well-drawn characters and a mass of historical detail make this 12th-century adventure entertaining despite its...
In all of Southwark, there's no more skilled saddlemaker than Master Mainard, married to shrewish Bertrild but deeply in love with Sabina, the blind whore who lives in the Old Priory Guesthouse, a brothel run by beautiful Magdalene la Bâtarde (A Mortal Bane, 1999). Mainard has installed Sabina in his home, but it seems to all the better part of discretion for Sabina to return to the Guesthouse after Bertrild is found stabbed to death in the back yard. Ensconced in the Old Priory, Sir Bellamy of Itchen (commonly called Bell), an emissary of the Bishop of Winchester and Magdalene's besotted admirer, is attempting to find Bertrild's killer. At length Bell reduces the list of likely suspects to the five men who ply their trade in the area of Mainard's workshop, from which the murder weapon had been stolen. But Bell's investigation is further complicated by the news that Bertrild had been doing a thriving business in blackmail; by a second killing; and by the arrival of Bertrild's uncle Sir Druerie, with his own decided ideas about the murderer's identity.
A host of well-drawn characters and a mass of historical detail make this 12th-century adventure entertaining despite its hopelessly confusing mishmash of a plot.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-86998-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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