In 26 beautifully written vignettes, playwright and oral historian Maynard tells the story of her experiences growing up Jewish in pre-Communist China. Maynard's father was a wealthy Jew who fled Communist Russia in the early 1920s to wait out the Revolution in Tientsin. There he met and married Maynard's mother, another Russian Jew, and in 1929, Isabelle Maynard was born to the doting couple. She grew up among loving relatives and Chinese servants, but she was an outsider many times over in her native land. A Russian among English and American embassy children, a Jew among the Russian Orthodox, a foreigner to the Chinese, Maynard was caught in a highly stratified world of conflicting cultures. Here she delicately approaches the sensitive areas of her multicultural existence. She talks of annually attending an Easter dinner at the home of a Russian Orthodox friend who knows not to offer Maynard pig but cannot stop her adult relatives from telling Jewish jokes when they get drunk. Maynard faces the evening stoically, wryly remarking, ``The pig and I, comrades in disaster, will face another year.'' But Maynard doesn't deny that she, too, was guilty of bigotry and bias. How else to explain the fact that she never really learned Chinese, although she was born in China and lived there until she was 18? In 1948, Maynard immigrated to America—``The Promised Land'' that she salutes, not without irony, in her final tale. She left China after having suffered through the Japanese occupation of her home and the ferocious conflict leading to the triumph of the Chinese Communists. Landing in San Francisco, the author had to cope with the harsh realities of the immigrant experience in America, confronting a life very different from the glamorous images she had found in American movies and magazines. In America, she found herself a stranger yet again. Lyrical memories of an unusual childhood. (10 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87745-562-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
