A Schindler Jew’s mediocre Holocaust memoir, buoyed by its generous humor and often fetching illustrations. As Holocaust memoirs go, Bau’s isn—t remarkably full of depravity, heroism, or miraculous escapes. Instead, for much of the memoir’s first half, the teenaged protagonist is incarcerated with his family in the ghetto of Krakow. Much of the black humor that pervades this section involves Joseph, as unpaid graphic artist, and his ever-scheming, comic-optimist brother Marcel, who tries to parlay Joseph’s skill into life-giving work permits and even financial rewards from their Nazi overlords. But relentless hunger, as the title suggests, is really the chief theme; the funniest section involves the misadventures that prevent three different sources of food from providing a beggar’s banquet. Still, Bau writes in earnest (and how could he not?): the ghetto is liquidated on March 13, 1943, and some 2,000 Jews are butchered in the process. Accordingly, the authorial eye observes a woman’s hand, protruding from a shallow mass grave, “pointing an accusing finger . . . as if to warn the killers that their hour of reckoning would surely come.” A latrine is then built above the grave. The inhumanity and inanity of the situation give Bau just the right opportunity for his understated wit, which proves to be the key to his survival, offered in resistance to a range of horrific events. He tells of his courtship and marriage to Rebecca Tannenbaum in the camp. Climactically, in the memoir’s final chapter, the now elderly Israeli couple braces as they—re called to testify at the Vienna trial of the Plaszow concentration camp’s killer of Blau’s father. Many of Bau’s 100 or so childish line drawings offer emotive illustration. He includes a few maudlin and inartistic poems that add little to this memoir.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55970-431-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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