A moving and intriguing family history only slightly marred by the author’s anger.
Remembering one Jewish Arab family’s past.
Los Angeles–based journalist Hayoun attempts to reclaim his family history and identity through this retelling of his grandparents’ saga. The author, who was mainly raised by his maternal grandparents, Daida and Oscar, identifies as both an Arab and a Jew, two descriptors he believes that many may feel are incompatible. He begins by arguing that, in fact, there is a long-standing tradition of Jewish Arabs, who lived and worked alongside their Muslim neighbors peacefully until colonialism disrupted Arab society and fractured it into various people groups. In addition to being a family story, the book is also an anti-colonial screed. Hayoun blames colonialism—he includes Zionism—for many of the ills that have beset the Arab people, and he sees the fight against colonialism as far from over. “Memory,” he writes, “can subvert colonial authority, it can frighten the colonizers because it allows us to reconfigure this miserable world we live in now, depose the white supremacist…and approach the European sector with open eyes, ready to disassemble empire.” The author’s disdain for the European world is palpable, and his allegiance is clearly with the Arab world. He describes his family’s condition as “our exile in Los Angeles,” and he notes that his religion is secondary to his ethnic identity: “I am Arab first and last. Judaism is an adjective that modifies my Arabness.” The core of the author’s work, however, consists of his grandparents’ stories of growing up in Tunisia and Egypt, surviving Nazi bombing and occupation, dealing with anti-Semitism during the founding of modern Israel, leaving North Africa, meeting in France, and finding their way, in the end, to America. Both grandparents left behind written autobiographical accounts, and from these, and other conversations, Hayoun pieces together a remarkable tale of survival and success, and it is a story worth remembering.
A moving and intriguing family history only slightly marred by the author’s anger.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62097-416-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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