Oore demonstrates the persistence of memory and the pervasiveness of evil.
A Holocaust survivor’s story shared through the generations.
Halifax-based Oore (French/Dalhousie Univ.; co-author: Marie-Claire Blais: An Annotated Bibliography, 1998) was born in Poland to a mother who escaped the fate of so many others in the Warsaw ghetto at least in part because she looked Aryan and was deemed attractive by those standards, marrying a gentile officer. The horrors that she witnessed could be considered unspeakable, yet she repeated them often to her daughter, beginning when she was 4 years old. “How could this apparently ‘normal’ woman tell such stories to a child?” the author wonders. “Though it seems to me she could not help but tell them. What choice did she have? What choice did I have?” None, Oore ultimately decided. Though she initially felt incapable of understanding the stories and the motive for sharing them, and later felt unworthy of sharing the story because the suffering was not hers, she believed that she must become the vessel for the story and that she would discover the value in sharing it with her own children. “She was letting go; the story was now truly in my possession,” writes the author. “The understanding was that I would tell the story. That was the deal: the story was now mine, and I had the moral obligation to tell it.” Oore also delves into how her mother’s “deep dislike of Jews, her self-hatred, came as an additional ‘fringe benefit’ of the story and has accompanied me all my life.” The author is older than her mother was when the storytelling began, and in sharing the story with her own adult children, she was able to find catharsis. It’s a slim memoir, but one that is instructive about the necessity of passing stories down to keep them alive.
Oore demonstrates the persistence of memory and the pervasiveness of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-88977-653-1
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Univ. of Regina
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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