Come for the scandalous marriage, but stay for the engaging cultural study of a time and place.
A debut memoir offers a wealth of mid-20th-century, upper-middle-class Jewish lore.
Krissel was born in 1941 into a Jewish upper-middle-class family. Her immigrant grandfather Morris became an extremely rich success, thanks to his brown grocery bag business. By the time she was born, he was the patriarch to whom abject obedience was owed. His two daughters, Kitty and Mimi, and their husbands lived cheek by jowl with one another and with Morris and his wife, Esther, on an estate in Mount Kisco, New York, or in an apartment house in Manhattan. In addition, the sons-in-law were dragooned into the family business. Kitty and Mimi filled their days schmoozing on the phone and shopping. In an age of robust anti-Semitism, there were Jewish country clubs, schools, and summer camps. About 20 families—“the Gang”—composed a very tightknit Jewish community, by choice and necessity. But when the author was to start ninth grade, Kitty decided to send her to a gentile, all-girls private high school—a fateful decision indeed. Krissel (who is referred to as “Toni” just once) was uncomfortable at first but eventually, because she was a good athlete, made friends. This breakthrough led inevitably to her meeting and marrying “Superwasp,” a lawyer whose forebears actually did come over on the Mayflower. The union produced three kids and still endures. Superwasp was accepted by the author’s family with surprisingly little trauma, with any objections basically being more cultural than religious. Krissel is a competent writer, offering some vivid anecdotes and rich historical details. But the memoir sometimes reads like diary jottings, and is a bit scattershot, as if recorded with the equivalent of a hand-held camera. One does wonder about the anonymity of it all. There are no surnames and “Superwasp” is all the author’s husband gets. This is Krissel’s right, of course, but readers will be naturally curious and find the approach a bit annoying. Still, as light entertainment, this book can hold its own: The audience will keep reading.
Come for the scandalous marriage, but stay for the engaging cultural study of a time and place.Pub Date: June 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-6256-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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