Uninspired prose makes this family epic less affecting that it ought to be.
Through two world wars, a German mother strives to bond with her estranged children in a debut novel inspired by real-life family history.
“I never had much patience for stories without any romance in them,” admits 96-year-old Margarete Leitloff. “I still don’t.” With that dictum in mind, Margarete (Grete to her friends) recalls her two-year courtship with Dr. Kasimir May, heir to a Polish chemical plant and nearly a decade Grete’s senior. When the two were finally wed in 1911, then-20-year-old Grete left her native Berlin for Kasimir’s hometown of Posen, where she tried in vain to win over her new husband’s mother, Helena, a domineering woman who loathed her daughter-in-law’s Prussian heritage and unrefinedness. Their relationship became all the more strained after Grete gave birth to Hela and Romek, whom Helena insisted Grete not breast-feed herself, as that activity was “rather something for the peasants.” While Helena grew more overbearing, Kasimir grew more emotionally withdrawn, eventually stunning Grete with his decision to fight in World War I. She accused him of deserting the family; he assured her the conflict would end in a few weeks. Thus arrives the novel’s first of many devastating blows: Kasimir’s death in action. Helena threatened to disinherit her grandchildren if Grete moved them to Germany, and homesick Grete left her children behind for life in war-ravaged Berlin. Over the following decades, as she contended with con men, family scandal, suicide, the rise of Hitler, and the second world war, Grete doggedly fought to win back the love of stubborn Hela and nurture the far more welcoming Romek. Though the story’s emotional stakes remain incredibly high, the prose rarely rises to the occasion. Grete’s narrative voice relies on exposition and frustrating clichés, sometimes many in a row: “Several days passed before the numbness subsided and the first tears ran down from my soul.” Every so often, however, she makes well-tread subject matter feel fresh, as when she observes a newborn as nothing more than “a dark-red bundle of screams.”
Uninspired prose makes this family epic less affecting that it ought to be.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1511829977
Page Count: 274
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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