With this family history, Epstein (Children of the Holocaust, 1979, etc.) adds a vivid and telling chapter to the reconstruction of Jewish women's history, one life at a time. While she can't recover all the details of her great- grandmother Therese's, grandmother Pepi's, and mother Franci's lives in Czechoslovakia, she more than compensates by re-creating the times, the milieus, and the circumstances in which they found themselves. The settings range from the Bohemian town of Brtnice, to the Belle Epoque Vienna of assimilated Jews such as Freud, Mahler, and Herzl, where Therese committed suicide after her oldest son's death from peritonitis, to newly independent and cosmopolitan Prague in the 1920s, where Pepi ran a fashion salon in which wealthy women gathered to gossip, exchange intimacies, and catch up on the latest Paris fashions, and ultimately to Auschwitz, Bergen- Belsen, and finally New York. Focusing in particular on the social roles of women, Epstein presents Pepi's salon as ``a rare institution that allowed a woman to acquire expertise and authority . . . a feminine realm, where women could speak.'' For Pepi and for Franci, who took over the business at the age of 18, it also provided a solid income and a refuge from harsh realities: marital unhappiness, the advent of Hitler, impending war. All three, Therese, Pepi, and Franci, were strong, capable women who faced great adversity, from poverty to the loss of loved ones to war and near-extermination. Other remarkable women figure in Epstein's tale: sternly pious Aunt Rosa, who raised the orphaned Pepi and lived to regret marrying her off to a man who turned out to be syphilitic (he did at least refrain from consummating their union); a friend of Franci's who worked for the Czech resistance during WW II. There is much more in this real-life family saga, about Czech history, and relations between men and women, Czechs and Jews, rich and poor. It is a compelling account, one that any woman trying to recover her history will value.
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-24608-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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