An engrossing and offbeat story of ideological bonds that chafe—and sometimes liberate.
A young woman experiences a sexual awakening—and romantic frustration—in a kooky cult in this debut coming-of-age memoir.
After her graduation from Harvard in 1999, Zuman’s search for herself took her to the Zendik Farm commune in North Carolina. Founded in the 1960s on countercultural blather, Zendik preached back-to-the-land living, contempt for the “Deathculture” of competitive capitalism, and psycho-motivational aphorisms—“Dare to demand the impossible and it becomes possible”—from deceased guru Wulf Zendik’s The Affirmative Life. In Zuman’s telling, Zendik’s reality is strange and crass. Members supported the commune by hawking its magazine, music CDs, and bumper stickers—“Stop Bitching Start a Revolution”—on the streets, which made maniacal salesmanship a Zendik must. Meanwhile, sex on the farm was rigidly bureaucratized. Members proposed “walks” (dates) or “dates” (sex appointments) with other Zendiks by lodging requests with administrators, who acted as go-betweens in scheduling assignations; women were denied dates if group gynecological exams indicated they were in a fertile phase. (The guru, who had bedded most female Zendiks, disliked condoms.) Zuman, a shy but yearning virgin, appreciated this protocol because it obviated her awkwardness at courtship; soon she had an active sex life and got to act out her rape fantasy (in a graphic description, it’s a painful, bloody fiasco ending in herpes). Unfortunately, Zendik thought monogamy undermined the group, and Zuman was repeatedly pressured into wrenching breakups with long-term boyfriends; but when she left the farm to hitchhike to Idaho and find permanent love, predatory men sent her running back. Zuman’s vivid portrait renders Zendik as a pressure cooker of jealousy and exploitation under the manipulative leadership of Arol, Wulf’s consort. Zendiks were exhorted to take personal responsibility for their dysfunctions, yet the supreme sin was “running your own show” in defiance of the collective—read Arol’s—will. Yet Zuman never makes herself a victim: She retains her sense of agency (and humor) as she weighs Zendik’s weird creed and power plays against the sense of righteousness and belonging that drew her in. Her whip-smart prose—on her selling shifts, she “hit up mostly single men, zeroing in on the disheveled, disaffected, afraid, and misshapen…if they paired superhero trucker caps with Coke-bottle glasses…so much the better”—conveys the squalid exuberance of Zendik’s blend of idealism and fraud.
An engrossing and offbeat story of ideological bonds that chafe—and sometimes liberate.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-337-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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