As a young man in 1930s Warsaw, Singer lived inconspicuously on the edge of a successful brother's literary circle, tormented by philosophical doubts and youthful skepticisms, involved with a much-older mistress (a typical Singer grotesque) and on intimate terms with other, equally obsessed women. Unlike the garrulous know-it-alls at the Writers Club, he had no conversational case, no political affiliation, and classic insecurities. This second volume of Singer's autobiography, despite its juvenile-looking large type, introduces adult themes: love is no game, human culture seems "one huge and complex fig leaf." Singer wants to write in Yiddish and broadly defends its literary merits but finds contemporary stories lacking in suspense, too often concerned with dull yeshiva boys and their in-laws. Always down to his last zlotyl, he earns a pittance as a careless proofreader and broods on how to proceed. He resolves "to become a narrator of human passion." But imps conspire—buttons fall off inopportunely, knotted shoelaces come untied—and women pursue the unlikely hero: one for sex, one for love, one for a passport-to-Palestine marriage. Besides brother I. J., the best-known background figure is Trotskyite editor Isaac Deutscher—here an outspoken ideologue—but even the peripheral ones, seen from Singer's artful-onlooker perspective, have symptomatic individualities loosely suggested in Raphael Soyer's sketchy drawings and paintings. And on the last page, the most promising of that trio of ladies unexpectedly reappears. We'll stay around.
Pub Date: March 1, 1978
ISBN: 0385123574
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1978
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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