A poignantly lyrical memoir of family and politics.
Lazarre (Inheritance, 2011, etc.) remembers her Communist Party organizer father and how she grew up in his “powerful, endearing, [and] at times intimidating” shadow.
Romanian-born Jewish radical activist William Lazarre was dedicated to “justice, human equality [and] dignity.” In this moving memoir, Lazarre’s daughter, the distinguished author of both fiction and nonfiction, recalls his life by drawing on memory, court documents, and data from his FBI file. As a young immigrant in 1920s Philadelphia, Lazarre gave—and was arrested for—speeches about worker revolution. Yet imprisonment did not quell his zeal for communism and social justice. During the 1930s, he deepened his involvement in the American Communist Party and went to Europe to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Upon his return, he worked as a section leader for the party. However, after World War II, already doubting the promises made by Soviet communism, Lazarre saw cracks emerge in American Communist Party leadership. Between 1948 and 1951, he lost his brother and then his wife. Then the party that had commanded his loyalty called him up on charges for “failures of obedience” while the House Un-American Activities Committee forced him to testify and the FBI tried to recruit him as an informer. The man the author remembers was one who commanded her respect but sometimes earned her scorn; he also revealed his frailty in bouts of severe depression. Feeling unable to measure up to her “mother’s elegance” and despite the rebellion implicit in her ideological choice of Freudianism and feminism over Marxism, she was always the daughter who sought to make “daddy love [her].” Through the family she started with a black civil rights activist, the author was finally able to begin healing their relationship by revealing the degree to which she shared her father’s vision for a humane, egalitarian world. Reflective and intelligent, her narrative not only chronicles the life of a complex man; it also celebrates the power of memory and love.
A poignantly lyrical memoir of family and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6937-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
© 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
