Simple, unpretentious prose makes Rosenblat’s memoir all the more potent.
A survivor’s memoir of the Shoah.
Rosenblat’s family, like the other Polish Jews, had tried to flee during the late 1930s, but they did not manage to escape the tightening circles of Nazi oppression. His father died of typhus in May 1942. Five months later, all the Jews in their ghetto were ordered to report for deportation in the middle of the night. Thirteen-year-old Herman claimed to be 16 and was selected for slave labor with his three older brothers. Their mother was sent directly to the death camp at Treblinka. She pushed Herman away when he begged to go with her, pretending to be angry so he would join his brothers. Only later, when he marched away and saw tears streaming down her face, did he realize what she had done. The Rosenblat brothers endured at Buchenwald and Theresienstadt. Remembered six decades later, their story is still vibrant and vivid. The author recalls his sleeping dreams and the waking nightmare of real life in a concentration camp. Though there are many astonishing twists in his narrative, there is none more remarkable than the tale of Rosenblat’s first two encounters with the young woman who became his wife—after they went on a blind date nine years later in Coney Island. (The young survivor had made his way to New York after being transported to England.) The author’s personal history attests to his recovery from a scarifying confrontation with systematic evil and murder on a cosmic scale. He leaves it to the reader to decide what his wartime experiences meant, then and now.
Simple, unpretentious prose makes Rosenblat’s memoir all the more potent.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-425-22581-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
