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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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