An evocative, multigenerational re-creation of an American Jewish family history, from life in a small Ukrainian village to the first post-immigrant generations in the US. Leonard, who writes and directs plays for children and teenagers at an outreach program of the Penn State School of Theater, uses a kind of imagined oral history, having long-dead ancestors, some known, some probably not, speak to her as she works in her kitchen. She is particularly good at capturing the terror of a Cossack-led pogrom, bringing to life families grieving for murdered members, others who are scattered and separated while fleeing, and one man who hides for 28 days under a barn door to avoid detection by the rampaging marauders. The dramatic center of her story—or, rather, her interconnected series of family tales—is the poignant account of a little girl named Anna, who is separated from her parents as they escape pogromniks, and is hidden and ultimately raised by a gentile woman. Her mother’s desperate search for her continues after she emigrates to America, and they are finally reunited after 12 years. For the most part, Leonard’s narrative is skillful and at times poetic. Occasionally, though, it is undermined by errors in Jewish rituals. Leonard has a relative preparing to eat a plate of soup say the blessing over bread, and mistranslates a line of the Kaddish (mourner’s prayer). Even more distracting are the author’s frequent brief asides to her two sons, which, though meant as commentary on the history she seems to be hearing, too often interrupt rather than enhance her story. If she has not produced one of the great family memoirs, however, Leonard goes far to help Jews and others gain an unromanticized appreciation of the “old home” in eastern Europe and the difficulties and joys of adapting to the new one in this country.
Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-80159-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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