A revealing profile of the Nobel laureate in literature by his son and only child. While Singer was pursuing his career in the US in the 1930s, young Zamir emigrated from Poland with his mother (from whom Singer was divorced in 1940), first to the USSR, then to Palestine, where the boy grew up on a kibbutz. When the young man finally visited his father in New York in 1955, their reunion understandably was strained; Singer hadn't even had mail contact with his son since 1949 and viewed his arrival as something of a burden, a distraction from his writing. The portrait Zamir draws of his father here is in many ways an unflattering one: Singer is shown as not only emotionally absent, but frugal to the point of cheapness and often narcissistic. For example, when Zamir proudly showed his father a collection of his own stories, the world-famous writer ``glanced at it only a few seconds, then he gave it back to me with an angry expression: `Why don't you translate my books instead of writing your own.' '' Still, during Zamir's subsequent visits to New York, and Singer's occasional trips to Israel, the relationship slowly warmed up as father and son collaborated on rendering the former's work into Hebrew, honestly discussed their difficult histories and their differing political and religious ideologies, and slowly learned to appreciate each other. Ultimately, Zamir states, ``a deep friendship between us was created''; however, the passive voice and the absence of the word ``love'' seem to reveal a lingering deep ambivalence. Zamir's book sometimes suffers mildly from a vague chronology—he rarely provides dates—and from his own autobiographical reticence. But generally, his style is fluid and colorful, and his memoir filled with interesting anecdotes and quotes. Must reading for fans of the master Yiddishist. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55970-309-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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