A cleareyed, moving memoir that increases understanding of a lesser-known Holocaust escape route and its trials.
As World War II breaks out in Poland, a Jewish family travels east in this memoir of survival.
Holocaust memoirs are a crowded field, but few tell the story of escape via Siberia and Tajikistan. Lipiner, in her debut work, describes how her father’s foresight, planning and resourcefulness saved the lives of 15 people. In the summer of 1939, Lipiner was 6 years old and enjoyed playing with her older sister Frydzia and cousins in quaint little Sucha Beskidzka, Poland. When the war broke out, her father, who was aware of the Nazis’ hatred of Jews, was ready: “Because he had sensed that the war was imminent, he had been planning our escape even before the war started.” He persuaded three generations—his own family and those of his two sisters, 15 people in all—to head toward Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, where Soviets eventually transported Jews to a labor camp in Siberia. When allowed to leave, the clan—led by Lipiner’s father—once again packed up, arriving at last in Leninabad, Tajikistan. To survive, they depended on the small Jewish community’s generosity. Hunger, cold and infectious disease besieged them, but the family survived. Through many difficulties, separations and turns of fortune in the chaos of postwar Europe, the family found a final refuge in America. Lipiner writes well from a child’s perspective: Cold and hungry in Siberia, she and her sister found magic in the frost flowers on the windows. While noting much great generosity, she also acknowledges the peevishness and despair that hardship can bring. Her father’s “intelligence, common sense, and gumption,” illustrated with many examples, is set compassionately against her mother’s crushed spirit. With such an emotional story to tell, it would have been easy to slide into pathos, but the author controls her tone well. A small anecdote about her father’s characteristic resourcefulness in putting together scrip to buy his worried daughter a chocolate bar depicts perfectly how he expressed love in deeds, not words: a beautiful miniature of what the entire book portrays.
A cleareyed, moving memoir that increases understanding of a lesser-known Holocaust escape route and its trials.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475934953
Page Count: 210
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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