Timeless lessons taught with simple eloquence.
A Holocaust survivor who has dedicated her life to sharing the lessons from that horrific time presents the questions most often asked her and the responses she gives.
Swedish psychologist and author Fried (Fragments of a Life: The Road to Auschwitz, 1990, etc.) has spent much of her career and most of her retirement keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, talking with students about her experiences in the hope that no such atrocity occurs again. “I have lectured about my time in the different camps almost daily since the 1980s, and each time I talk about it, it feels like reliving it,” she writes. “Despite being very difficult, it has led to something good—it became a way for me to process my trauma.” Her approach in this concise book seems similarly cathartic, with her matter-of-fact tone conveying the everyday horror of something that had once seemed unspeakable until it was inevitable. She attributes her survival to luck and chance and to the sister with whom she remained connected after both had been separated from the rest of their family. The author writes of her impressions as a teenage girl sent to the camps, and the effect is something like what Anne Frank might have written had she survived, the writing aimed at readers who are now the same age as she was then. The questions she finds herself asked at these school lectures are the most basic and most difficult: “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?”; “Why did you not fight back?”; “Do you hate the Germans?” Regarding the last question, she admits that she did but ultimately realized that “hatred does not affect the hated, but the one who hates feels terrible. It arouses vengeful feelings, and if these are acted upon the hated will soon become the one who hates. It leads to a never-ending spiral of hatred.” Fried identifies with subsequent generations of refugees and recognizes just how ugly persecution can turn if good people do nothing.
Timeless lessons taught with simple eloquence.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947534-59-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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