From nonagenarian expatriate Green (The Green Paradise, p. 1233, etc.): a collection comprised of essays, lecture notes, and a short story written in 1920, when the author was a student at the University of Virginia. Like papers retrieved from a trunk in the attic, a few of these pieces carry a whiff of the antique—but there's also much to savor and enjoy. Born in France to American parents, Green grew up bilingual, although—as he admits in ``An Experiment in English''- -``as a child I could not believe English was a real language, to me the real names of things were French.'' This dichotomy leads Green to analyze the difficulty of writing in another language; the way in which language shapes material; and the challenges that writers face in exile. He cites a poignant encounter in wartime London with his great friend AndrÇ Gide, who wanted to ask a bus conductor for directions; though Gide could talk easily with English-speaking literati, he was ignorant of colloquial English. This subtle difference between language and nationality is further explored in ``Translation and the Fields of Scripture,'' while, in ``On Keeping a Diary,'' Green writes about the difficulty of telling the truth as well as of giving an accurate self-portrait- -``one of the most hazardous occupations because it involves the whole of a man's personality, good and bad.'' Other notable pieces include a lecture on ``How a Novelist Begins''—which remains relevant and fresh, as do ``Eight Lectures on Novel Writing''—and a memoir, ``As I Look Back,'' recalling Paris between the wars and Green's friendship with writers like Gide and Cocteau. The short story (``The Apprentice Psychiatrist'') and some recollections of now-forgotten French writers and literary salons have not worn as well. Elegant evocations of a golden age when writers wrote—and lived well—in Paris, which truly was the city of light.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-7145-2956-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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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