Like Wladyslaw Szpilman’s The Pianist, a well-written, perceptive tale that evokes the splendor of prewar Warsaw and its...
A combination of musical memoir and Holocaust history, in which pianist Filar traces his career from Warsaw to Philadelphia, revealing how his passion for music helped him persevere, and defending his decision to study in postwar Berlin under world-renowned pianist Walter Gieseking, an alleged Nazi.
Born in 1917, Filar began playing with the Warsaw Philharmonic when he was 12. After the Germans invaded Poland, he participated in the Warsaw ghetto’s resistance movement until 1943, when the Nazis murdered his parents and sent him to Buchenwald. In the camp’s munitions factory, Filar almost lost a hand working with knives. His dream of becoming a concert pianist—his prime motivation to survive—would have perished had a Pole not given him some disinfectant. After his injury healed, Filar boldly demanded safer working conditions from a sympathetic German. Reasoning that death was inevitable, he took other risks that ultimately saved his life. After liberation, Filar sought an apprenticeship with Gieseking. He refutes allegations that Gieseking was a Nazi, noting that Gieseking often played the music of the Jewish-born Felix Mendelssohn. His olympian perspective rises above ethnic divisions and simple labels of hero and villain. Filar cannot forget that a German also helped save his hands. He pities “brainwashed” Nazi youths who threw stones at him. Admitting his postwar acts of revenge, he reveals that he “played kickball” with a captured Gestapo chief and—after immigrating to New York City during the ’50s—attacked a former Polish official who had slapped his father with a “Jewish tax” years earlier in Warsaw. Toward the story’s end, Filar focuses on the rewarding aspects of his career, sharing the joy of playing in the concert halls of Israel, Brazil, and New York.
Like Wladyslaw Szpilman’s The Pianist, a well-written, perceptive tale that evokes the splendor of prewar Warsaw and its progressive music scene, and a poetic testimony of artistic beauty triumphing over evil.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57806-419-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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