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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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