by Margaret Grguri Smolik ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2014
While somewhat uneven in organization and recollection, this book remains an important historical document and a reminder of...
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A debut memoir offers insights into relocation during World War II and glimpses of subsequent life in Austria and the United States.
Smolik was born in 1942 in Vocin, Yugoslavia. Two years later, as local fighting intensified, she and her family—two sisters, mother, and maternal grandparents—moved to Dresden, where they remained until just before the 1945 bombing of that city. The family was relocated to Austria, reunited with Smolik's now ex–prisoner-of-war father, and stayed briefly in various refugee camps until settling in a village near Steyr. In 1952, through the International Refugee Organization, they moved to rural Iowa and then to Des Moines. Smolik admits to recalling little of Yugoslavia, the war, and the early years in Germany and Austria, events that constitute the first half of her book. Nonetheless, she draws on historical records and her older sister’s recollections to aptly describe the tumult of displacement and the wherewithal required to maintain family life, faith, and tradition in a new country. Not surprisingly, Smolik’s writing is most poignant when relating her own, very childlike memories of this time: decorating the Christmas tree with apples, eating roasted snails, receiving tooth powder in an aid package at school. The second half of the volume describes life as a new immigrant in the U.S.: early days as a fourth-grader who knew little English and few American customs and later years as a high school and university student. At times, these later accounts—of friends, shopping, dances, church—read like those of any young girl in 1950s Iowa, perhaps a testament to Smolik’s acclimatization. Yet she always circles back to how war has shaped her and her family. She calls herself “both a casualty and a survivor” of World War II, a many-layered “haystack” buffeted by external events yet strong at the core. Despite occasional lapses into encyclopedialike summaries of history, religion, and geography, Smolik’s writing is clear and her narrative compelling.
While somewhat uneven in organization and recollection, this book remains an important historical document and a reminder of the lasting effects of displacement.Pub Date: July 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4908-4034-5
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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