A masterpiece of memoir: a volume that soars, sings, and sobs.
A dazzling memoir by the nonagenarian novelist who discovers along the way a most damning document among her family’s papers.
It takes more than 260 pages for Calisher (Sunday Jews, 2002, etc.) to tell us the details of this document—a receipt for an 1856 life-insurance policy, bought in Richmond, Virginia, by her grandfather for two of his “servants” (i.e., slaves). The author, devastated by the discovery (“I am hangdog, ebullience gone,” she writes), ends this wonderful, lyrical account with a tattoo—a bugle summons, thrice uttered: “Remember the slave.” What leads us to this tattoo is some of the most lovely language imaginable—Emersonian in its richness, Nabokovian in its evocativeness. She begins the first of her several major sections—unnumbered, unnamed—with a memory of her father telling her that her grandmother had never kept slaves. (Later, Calisher says she believes her father wanted her to find the document.) And then she begins her journey into the tangled wood of her family’s history. She remembers the German and broken English she heard in childhood (her Jewish grandfather had arrived from Germany around 1827), and many of the early pages are spiced with German words and phrases (usually translated). She gradually moves along history’s pathways, diverging here and there, returning always to the main road. When she nears painful moments (an estrangement from her brother), she temporizes, waits. But who cares? For on nearly every page of this journey is a sentence you wish you’d written (e.g., “But humility is a prism, all of whose sides a child is not yet equipped to see”). She alludes only occasionally to her adult history—to two marriages, the birth of a child, a writing career. What matters here—what really matters here—is that complex web of family; and she discovers in its intricate silkiness a small but purely poisonous spider.
A masterpiece of memoir: a volume that soars, sings, and sobs.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101096-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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