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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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