A remarkable story, told with clarity and appreciation for the joy and courage that characterized the Kulturbund. As the...
A nattily written, moving history of the Kulturbund—a Jewish cultural agency that collaborated with the Nazis during the early years of the Third Reich—from NPR commentator Goldsmith, whose parents were members of the group.
When Goldsmith turned 40, he started asking his father questions that served to melt the reserve between the two men, questions about what it was like to be a Jew in Germany in the 1930s. What his father had to tell him was the dumbfounding story of the Kulturbund, where Jews—and only Jews—could gather for musical and theatrical performances, onstage or in the audience. This is essentially a linear narrative history, with the story of Goldsmith’s parents braided into the Kulturbund tale—although he does take a stab at trying to explain how and why such an institution could even exist. On the Nazis’ part, the reasons were not so abstruse: the Kulturbund restricted Jewish artists to one venue, it deflected international criticism of Nazi treatment of the Jews, it played out some intra-party squabbles, and it could serve to forestall any Jewish revolt—this was 1933, remember. The Jewish rationale for participating is murkier by far. Weren’t the players endangered by staying in Germany, asks Goldsmith? Didn’t the Kulturbund lend an aura of legitimacy to the Nazis? Didn’t art obscure moral and mortal risk? There are no simple answers, Goldsmith concludes, but perhaps it is enough to understand “the power of art to make people whole,” and to “imagine how important the Kulturbund was to people sorely in need of a little happiness.” Goldsmith’s profiles of the principal members of the Kulturbund are sharp and affecting, and his depiction of the noose steadily tightening about the necks of Jews in Germany during the 1930s makes fine, grim reading.
A remarkable story, told with clarity and appreciation for the joy and courage that characterized the Kulturbund. As the author puts it: “Such hope. It breaks your heart.”Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2000
ISBN: 0-471-35097-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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