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
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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