A memoir whose heart pays considerable homage to its subjects.
Humor and tragedy blend seamlessly in this memoir of childhood upbringing and family trauma.
The daughter of Holocaust survivors and one of seven sisters, Pressman recounts her youth in Skokie, Ill., and how it intermingles with her family history. Throughout her young life, she often derides her parents’ obsession with their harrowing past, at one point scoffing that “Holocaust Judaism” has become their surrogate religion in place of more established movements of American Judaism. But as much as she tries to mold the haunting tales of her parents to her “happy ending template,” or even ignore them altogether, these stories—and the lessons they tell—play a crucial role in her formative years. Interweaving various events across time, the memoir juxtaposes Pressman’s angst at her ancestry’s ineluctable grip with the pre-adolescent and teenage tribulations she experiences in her comfortable suburban milieu. These strands occasionally diverge too widely, causing some family anecdotes to feel arbitrary as much as they prove entertaining. Still, the poignancy of Pressman’s voice and her meticulous attention to detail instill life into the characters and settings that surround her, as well as the ghosts of horrors past. This work separates itself from the ever-expanding memoir pool by emphasizing the universal aspects of deeply personal issues. Anyone with siblings can relate to the author’s amusing descriptions of the complicated power dynamics among her sisters. Even if one has never met a Holocaust survivor, he or she can empathize with Pressman’s attempts to grasp the weight of her parents’ struggle to survive. The memoir doesn’t unequivocally justify the actions or beliefs of any one character, but its overriding sense of pathos honors each person’s way of dealing with triumph and defeat. Since it deals with issues of existence, this quality has never been more necessary.
A memoir whose heart pays considerable homage to its subjects.Pub Date: April 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456470685
Page Count: 339
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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