Satisfying and surprising.
A refreshing debut memoir about growing up in between races and in between families.
Ragusa’s African-American mother and Italian-American father had a torrid fling that petered out after their daughter was conceived. As a child, she was shuttled back and forth between Harlem and New Jersey, living sometimes with maternal grandmother Miriam, sometimes with dad and his extended family. Indeed, this narrative of childhood isn’t so much about the author as it is about the people who raised her. In a loving, humanizing portrait of her Harlem apartment building, for example, Ragusa writes, “The women in the building literally kept it functioning”: cleaning the hallways, watching each other’s kids, taking the landlord to court when necessary. She knew her maternal great-grandmother only as an old lady, but drawing on photographs, a preserved flapper dress, census records and her grandmother’s stories, she is able to recreate the life and times of a bold, ballsy Harlem Renaissance hanger-on who went through husbands with an ease that rivaled Elizabeth Taylor’s. Ragusa is sensitive to the political implications of her life story. She feels ambivalent about light-skinned Miriam’s ability to hire a darker-skinned woman to care for her as a baby: “How do I speak of this without shame? I began my life within the shadow of a past that is impossible to escape.” When it comes to her parents’ failures—her father was a drug addict; her drop-dead gorgeous mother moved to Italy to follow a successful modeling career and a man, leaving Kym with Miriam—Ragusa is stunningly generous. She never sugar-coats, but neither does she indulge in rancor or endless complaining about dysfunctional family dynamics. The book occasionally meanders, the ending is abrupt and the author has a tendency to rely on descriptions of photographs to move the story along. But these are forgivable missteps from a first-time author whose footing will be surer in the future.
Satisfying and surprising.Pub Date: May 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-05890-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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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