Poignant, creative, and unique.
A Man Booker International Prize–winning translator’s photo-illustrated memoir about how growing up meant growing away from the younger sister she loved.
Changing “names, identifying details, and places,” Croft tells the story of two sisters, Amy and Zoe, that draws on events from her own life. Elder sister Amy was in second grade when Zoe had the first of several seizures. Doctors concluded the episode stemmed from a mild concussion, but after another, more violent episode, scans revealed a tumor in Zoe’s brain. The girls’ parents home-schooled both girls, who developed a rivalry over Olympic ice skaters: Amy favored those from Russia and Zoe those from the Ukraine. When their father hired a Ukrainian-born tutor named Sasha to teach them the language of each girl’s respective favorite country, the girls suddenly found themselves vying for his attention. But as Amy uncovered her linguistic gifts, she also found herself falling in love with Sasha, who later killed himself. She began college shortly afterward at age 15, where she indulged her passion for both languages and photography. In the meantime, Zoe, now homebound, was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus. Consumed by guilt for the misfortunes of both her sister and Sasha, Amy fixated on and then attempted suicide. After she graduated at 18, she left Oklahoma for Berlin, hoping to leave behind her troubled home and become “a whole new person.” Her travels, which she recorded in idiosyncratic photographs, took her all over Europe, where she experienced the epiphany at the heart of this book. Despite the apparent ease with which she moved between countries and languages, Amy’s truest desire was to “fix forever the presence of her sister [and] never let her go” in every photo she shot. Haunting and visually poetic, Croft’s book explores the interplay between words and images and the complexity of sisterly bonds with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity.
Poignant, creative, and unique.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944700-94-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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