Bleak, blistering, beautiful.
An Israeli journalist explores the interweaving of history and relationships in essays (originally published in Hebrew in 1999) about Israelis who have experienced the odd and extraordinary.
Having spent years writing about Israeli trauma and “how new lives are built on the ruins,” Sarna, founder of the Peace Now movement, here focuses on the inhabitants of a world where history digs its claws deep into the present, and twists. An abandoned Israeli orphan who rose through the ranks of the army to become a decorated commander, worked for the Shin Bet (Israel's secret security agency), and led raids against Palestinian terrorist bases, finally finds that his mother is still alive—having fled Israel decades ago to live as an Arab in Jordan. Two children of emotionally destroyed Holocaust survivors grow safely to middle age, and then, separated by an ocean, kill themselves within two months of each other. A Russian immigrant who may be haunted by the landscape and culture of his mother country crashes his car in the desert and runs away from his companions to disappear for good without a trace. In a parched wilderness near Beersheva, a place “poor as a curse,” a Bedouin boy kills his father—and Sarna argues eloquently for pardoning the parricide. The author has an uncanny gift for rooting out ineffable misery and rendering it visible to the reader, who can become acquainted with what it might have been like to be a seven-year-old Polish Jewish boy when the Germans rolled into the country; or how it might feel to be a Jew in Kurdistan living through first the Turkish, then the British, and then the Iraqi regimes; or what one might think under enemy fire in the middle of a minefield, surrounded by ripped and bleeding comrades, you the only hope of anyone’s survival.
Bleak, blistering, beautiful.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42062-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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
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