A miraculous journey of mother and son for whom music provided strength and nourishment.
The harrowing tale of a Czech concert pianist’s survival at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
At 108 years old in 2011, Alice Herz-Sommer is the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor, residing in Jerusalem since the Communist regime forced her from her Prague home in 1949. In this novelistic reconstruction of her life by her friend Piechocki and journalist Müller (Anne Frank: The Biography, 1998, etc.), Herz-Sommer is portrayed as the stronger-willed of twin girls born to a mismatched German-speaking Jewish couple in Prague in 1903. From a young age she was determined to master the piano. Her older sister included her twin sisters in visits with other German-speaking Jewish friends who formed the intellectual literary Prague Circle—e.g., Max Brod, Oskar Baum and Franz Kafka. A student at the German Academy of Music after World War I, Herz became a notable concert pianist and teacher, married businessman Leopold Sommer and had a son, Stephan, by the time the Nazis marched into Prague in 1939. While many of her family emigrated to Palestine, the Sommers remained in Prague, only to see their lives drained bit by bit. First, Herz’s elderly mother was deported to Theresienstadt, after which she taught herself the Chopin Etudes out of despair; then the Sommers were deported as well in 1943. At the camp, Alice became a sought-after pianist for the many musical productions organized by the Free Time Organization, while Stephan was enlisted in children’s choruses. Herz would often play the Chopin Etudes in concerts for the inmates, while Stephan acted in the SS propaganda film made to show the world what a “ghetto paradise” the camp was. Meanwhile, transports continued, Leopold was deported to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt was rumored to be evacuated. However, Alice was allowed to stay, giving her last concert at the camp in 1945.
A miraculous journey of mother and son for whom music provided strength and nourishment.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00741-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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