A touching, angry, humorous, and engaging account of a turbulent life.
A debut memoir excavates the secrets and multigenerational dysfunctions of a family.
Meyers’ life did not begin auspiciously. Conceived to keep her father, Gerry, out of World War II, she became less consequential when he was given 4-F status a few months before her arrival. Gerry and Tessie, children of Eastern European immigrants, were raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn when the area was essentially a Jewish ghetto. Their marriage was at best tumultuous, and Meyers spent her childhood navigating the space between her warring parents. Gerry was a womanizer who played on the edges of the Jewish mob. As a teenager, he was a leader in the Amboy Dukes, a feeder gang for Murder Inc., although there is no indication that he joined the “corporation.” Tessie was emotionally fragile and attempted suicide several times (finally succeeding in 1970). In 1957, the teenage Meyers spent the summer at a Catskills bungalow colony, where her grandmother worked a small concession. There the author met Ralph Lifshitz and fell passionately in love. Unfortunately, the relationship ended before it really began, and in 1961, desperate to move away from home, she married her buddy Howard. Twelve years and three sons later, they divorced. Meyers went on to college and a new marriage; she is currently a psychologist and psychoanalyst. The complex narrative, a series of long, evocative essays, often moves back and forth in time, as one experience or another is related to a memory from the past. This produces some repetition. But edgy, masterful prose, sprinkled with the Yiddish expressions of Meyers’ youth, gradually peels away the layers of hurt, confusion, and guilt—and includes a few surprises (for example, Ralph’s current identity). Of her grandparents’ marriage, she writes: “Eva, unlike Harry, was unable to protest. She packed her dreams in her suitcase, walked down the aisle and took the oath of servitude.” The author’s descriptions of 1940s Brooklyn, where she spent time with her grandmother, paint a sharp period portrait: “The butcher shop had sawdust on the floor, a finger on the scale, and Esther, the chicken plucker, in the corner.”
A touching, angry, humorous, and engaging account of a turbulent life.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-355-7
Page Count: 234
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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