An utterly believable close-up picture of one illegal immigrant’s life in the United States.
A memoir from a decent man living in the shadows, evading questions and telling lies, presented here anonymously since to reveal his identity would mean to risk arrest and deportation.
A volume in the Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest series, N.’s story is one of isolation, sorrow and anger. When he crossed the Mexican-American border as a teenager, he had only a ninth-grade education, and he did not speak English. In Chicago, where he had relatives and got work as a dishwasher, he learned English, earned a high school equivalency diploma and went on to major in philosophy in college and earn a master’s degree in Latin-American literature. N. writes movingly of growing up in Guadalajara, of the family there he cannot visit, of his estrangement from the Latino community in Chicago, and of the personal humiliations he experienced and the deceptions he practiced to keep his well-paid, white-collar job. He could not let his co-workers discover that he lacked legal documentation of citizenship, that he could not vote or travel. Eventually, his fake social security number cost him his job, and by the end of the book, he has become a stay-at-home father dependent on his American wife. N. is still a young man, so what his future holds is another story yet to be written. While this is primarily a rather dignified personal story, between the personal passages, the author also writes angrily about the failure of the United States to reform its immigration laws. President Barack Obama comes in for especially harsh criticism, having raised hopes that have yet to be fulfilled. N.’s style often has a stilted quality, perhaps the result of his acquisition of English through formal means, but he gets his message across clearly.
An utterly believable close-up picture of one illegal immigrant’s life in the United States.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-252-07986-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
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
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