Nothing less than the history of European Jewry from the end of the last century to the establishment of the state of Israel is the subject of this big novel. The story opens of Cyrpus right after World War II when the British, having declared immigration to Palestine illegal, are interning Jewish DPs in detention camps. Kitty Fremont, an American nurse who has plunged herself into rehabilitation work with war orphans to forget the deaths of her husband and small daughter, and Ari Ben Canaan, a Palestinian agent of the illegal immigration organization, are the two main characters. Ari pulls off his scheme to force the English to let a boatload of children sail for Palestine and Kitty (no lover of the Jews) goes along to be with Karen, a German girl who reminds her of her dead child. Karen loves Dov, a hero of the Warsaw ghetto and a concentration camp graduate. In flashbacks the backgrounds of the children are told as is a brief history of the Polish and German Jews. The reader also learns Ari's story which is primarily the history of his father who, forced to leave Russia, walked to Palestine and in due time established himself as a leader of his people. The love stories of Dov and Karen, Kitty and Ari move against the background of recent years in Israel and there is hardly anything in the way of geography, history, sociology and economics that is left out. The death of Karen by an Arab patrol brings Ari and Kitty together and the book ends on a hopeful note. For all of his lack of the basic literary skills Uris, writing from a hotly partisan viewpoint, has succeeded in welding his material into an effective and dramatic novel that should certainly reach the audience it is aimed at—and probably more besides.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0553258478
Page Count: 602
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1958
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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