More gruesome evidence of what we will do to one another; more sanguine evidence of the determination to remain human.
A horrifying yet inspiring story of a young man’s life before, during, and after the Holocaust.
Eisen was living in Czechoslovakia when the Nazis began their sweep across Europe. He points out that many did not believe that the roundup would include them, but, of course, it eventually did. He spends some 50 pages discussing his pre-Holocaust life—school, summers working on a farm—and then tells about his family’s arrest, the train to Auschwitz, and the “cruelty of the SS guards.” Those familiar with the vile history of the camp will recognize the routines and indignities (and worse) that the author and his family experienced. Eventually, all of his family members were “selected” for murder, and he records his sad farewell with his father, who implored him to tell the story. As the war wound down, the prisoners were moved, occasioning yet more unspeakable horrors, including some starving, desperate prisoners’ resorting to cannibalism. Eisen had just turned 16 when the Americans liberated the camp. In the final third of the book, the author deals with the immediate post-Holocaust years: his struggles to get back to his town and decision to leave, the kindness (and unkindness) of strangers, his re-arrest by the communists, his fortunate release from prison, and the complicated and highly risky decision to leave Europe for Canada. Eisen subsequently married, had a family, found a career in bookbinding, and, in 1988, began speaking frequently about the Holocaust to a wide variety of groups. His research has taken him back to Auschwitz numerous times. He acknowledges at the outset that he cannot, of course, remember everything that happened in 1944, but, as readers will quickly discover, so much of what happened to him resides firmly in the category of unforgettable.
More gruesome evidence of what we will do to one another; more sanguine evidence of the determination to remain human.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-05014-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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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