Affecting records of a world at once familiar and distant—a welcome addition to the literature of the Shoah.
A moving work of literary archaeology, rescuing Jewish texts from the oblivion of history.
“Es iz shver tsu zeyn a yid.” It’s hard to be a Jew. History has proven that countless times, with particular fury in the place New Yorkercontributing cartoonist Krimstein calls Yiddishuania. There, in 1939, a linguistic and cultural institute mounted “an ethnographic study in the guise of a meagerly funded autobiography contest.” By cruel irony, the winners were to be announced on Sept. 1, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland. The Gestapo seized many of the documents, but librarians spirited some away—and then hid them again when Stalin launched a Soviet pogrom after the war. The first essay, by an unidentified 17-year-old girl, is a record of repression: She was discouraged from reading religious and secular texts thought inappropriate for women and was forbidden from saying kaddish after her father died. Another essay recounts the efforts of a 20-year-old man who spent his time and money writing letters to Franklin Roosevelt pleading for asylum, a request that the State Department declined. Another young man questions traditional religion, not least because he was in love with a young woman who did not return the affection. “Was it because I didn’t become a Communist and start eating pork?” he wonders. “Was it because I couldn’t go to the dinner dance her socialist youth group had on Yom Kippur?” The ordinary travails of adolescence and young adulthood become more sharply pronounced against the background of descending terror. In this excellent follow-up to The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, Krimstein, whose illustrations recall both Chagall and Art Spiegelman, closes by affirming these pieces as “voices, garments, smiles, years, laughter”—in short, living documents in the face of death.
Affecting records of a world at once familiar and distant—a welcome addition to the literature of the Shoah.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-370-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A sharply different deconstruction of the prevailing orthodoxy, worthy of attention.
Leverett (International Affairs/Pennsylvania State Univ.; Inheriting Syria: Bashir's Trial by Fire, 2005) and his wife, Hillary, argue that, unless it changes, “the United States’ Iran policy is locked in a trajectory…that will ultimately lead to war.”
The authors take on what they identify as “a powerful mythology” that continues to influence U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic—primarily, the proposition that because it is unpopular, the regime “is in imminent danger of being overthrown.” They offer an alternative to the prevailing view that Khomeini and his supporters hijacked the liberal revolution that began in 1978 and “betrayed the aspirations of those who actually carried out the campaign that deposed the shah.” The Leveretts take issue with American policymakers who propose that the U.S. should advocate the overthrow of the present regime in favor of liberal democracy. They believe in the possibility of negotiating with the present regime. The authors dispute the view that the mullahs have done nothing for the population and lack support, showing how literacy, health and medical care have been upgraded and the economy developed. They highlight present concerns about the Iranian nuclear program, which they claim are exaggerated. They identify the continuing influence of the neoconservatives, who brought about the second Iraq war, and “liberal internationalists,” who are ready to deploy military force in support of human rights. They believe that the time has come for an initiative like Nixon's visit to Beijing to begin a change in course.
A sharply different deconstruction of the prevailing orthodoxy, worthy of attention.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9419-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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