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
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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