A welcome addition to the World War II memoir shelf.
A gripping memoir from an Eastern European Jew who fought in the French Resistance.
Born in 1921, Rosenberg, who has received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star from the U.S. Army for his service in World War II, thrived within a loving Polish family into his teenage years. His residence in Danzig meant immersion in both Polish and German culture, and his parents believed that Danzig’s well-integrated Jewish population would escape the rise of Hitler and his Nazi supporters. When that optimism began to crumble, the 16-year-old Rosenberg departed Danzig to study in Paris. (Nobody knew then that most of his relatives would be slaughtered in the Holocaust. Rosenberg’s parents and sister survived, but the author would be separated from them until 1952.) The German invasion of France interrupted Rosenberg’s studies. On his own, with dwindling cash, he decided against trying to flee the Nazi juggernaut. Instead, he found a path to joining the underground resistance against the Nazis, centered in occupied France and comprised of fighters from a variety of backgrounds, including expatriate Americans. Rosenberg offered special value as a Resistance guerrilla for multiple reasons: Given his blond hair and other physical features, he did not “look Jewish.” His baby face meant that he could easily pass as a schoolboy. He spoke Polish, German, Yiddish, and English. He could subsist on meager resources during wartime hardships. He welcomed all assignments offered by Resistance commanders, and he was fearless. The narrative unfolds chronologically, in semi-diary format, and while readers will know, of course, that Rosenberg avoided death, the narrative tension is continuous, as the author recalls imprisonments, escapes from confinement, and successful missions against the Nazis. The author’s writing style is crystal-clear and understated, as he wisely allows the drama to unfold from the events themselves. As the war wound down, Rosenberg was unsure about his future. Eventually, he settled in the U.S. and has taught language and literature for 70 years.
A welcome addition to the World War II memoir shelf.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-274219-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
IN THE NEWS
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
