Gordon, a biographer of remarkable gifts (Eliot's New Life, 1988, etc.), turns her glass inward and examines the youth and maturity that she and her friends knew in Cape Town, Israel, New York, and Europe: a wide-ranging picaresque story bound together by childhood attachments never set aside. As a Jew growing up in South Africa in the 1950's, Gordon found herself doubly isolated, for the gentile community that surrounded her—and through which she could move only with the most practiced circumspection—was itself implacably sealed off from the black population that comprised the country's invisible majority. The effect was claustrophobic in the extreme and brought Gordon into alliance with schoolmates who suffered the contradictions as keenly as she did. Her narrative quickly focuses on three of these: Romy, Ellie, and Rose—all of whom died young, all of whom struggled against the social and imaginative constraints of their society. This is preeminently a story of exile—the actual exile of those (like Gordon) who left a world they could no longer endure, and the internal exile of those who tried to manage in a place that gave no scope to their desires—and it moves along that boundary between nostalgia and anger that is the exile's true domain. Good use is made of the diaries and letters of those concerned, and Gordon's voice is both intimate and precise throughout—especially as she describes her own difficulties in establishing an academic career. The tribute that she pays her friends is not entirely testimonial, however, for it sets forth the process by which Gordon grew into her own role—as an observer and interpreter of the lives of others. Elegant and strong: a subtle eye trained across years of memory. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 29, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-03164-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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