by Joan Arnay Halperin ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A thoroughly researched and intensely moving remembrance.
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In this debut memoir, a Jewish American woman charts her family’s escape from Nazi-occupied Europe and celebrates the memory of a sibling she never met.
It was a hot afternoon in July 1956 when Halperin discovered that she had a sister. The 11-year-old author was enjoying a picnic with her parents in Bear Mountain State Park in New York when her father, Ignas, had a chance encounter with a fellow Polish refugee. The meeting led to a revelation that the author’s older sibling, Yvonne, had died while the family was fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe for America. However, Halperin had been unaware of her existence. The author begins the narrative by documenting her parents’ lives in Poland before World War II. She describes how her mother spoke of her youth in Lodz as “a great life…a life full of family all around.” Her parents married in 1935 and later relocated to Brussels, where Ignas opened a shoe shop. Yvonne was born in 1938, and the following year, Germany invaded Poland. By 1940, the family joined the crowds of desperate refugees intent on escape. Halperin follows her family’s passage through Bordeaux, France, to Portugal and onward to Jamaica where, tragically, Yvonne died following a bicycle accident. Presented in landscape orientation and in full color, the book records a journey of terror, hope, and loss, using family photographs, letters, and legal documents. It’s like being allowed access to a family’s private archive, and Halperin’s erudite, tender prose carefully explains the significance of each and every slip of paper. For instance, regarding her mother’s application for a U.S. immigration visa, she writes, “Hala tightened her grip on the pen. She pictured the marble stone they placed above Yvonne’s grave and with a heartache that was unbearable, she wrote: ‘I have no children.’ ” The author’s laconic but powerfully evocative style allows the reader to step back to the very moment when this heartbreaking declaration was made. Overall, this is an important and deeply personal memoir that vividly documents the struggles of a refugee family.
A thoroughly researched and intensely moving remembrance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-692-84489-2
Page Count: 86
Publisher: JMA Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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