A riveting, draining and reflective account of how people prevail over awful fortunes.
An American daughter captures the personal history of her mother, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide.
Though long denied by the Republic of Turkey, the ritualized ethnic cleansing and deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians from 1915 to 1917 is one of the great horrors of modern history. It also presents both survivors and subsequent generations with the thorny conundrum of memory and cultural identity–specifically, how to confront the crimes we have been told to forget. Ahnert delves into these issues in this moving portrait of her mother, Ester, who personally experienced these terrible events. With delicate intimacy, the author interleaves the remembrances of her 98-year-old mother with her own recollections of their personal relationship. “This is the story of us, told together,” she writes. At just 15 years old, Ester was separated from her family during a forced march from her home town of Amasia, a mountain village in what is now Northern Turkey. Abused by soldiers and forced to marry a vindictive Turk, Ester eventually escaped to find a new life overseas. “The only thing I brought with me to America was my memory,” she says, “the one thing I most wanted to leave behind.” The dichotomy between Ester’s graphic recollections of rape, murder and other atrocities and Ahnert’s obvious affection for her mother is occasionally startling, but the net effect is poignancy rather than sensationalism. The author struggles with her own uncertain feelings about her heritage, but her mother’s story is what will stick with the reader–Ester’s stirring sense of humor, her unflagging faith and remarkable fortitude in the face of nearly impossible odds.
A riveting, draining and reflective account of how people prevail over awful fortunes.Pub Date: April 24, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8253-0512-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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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