A significant addition to the literature on the Holocaust.
In her impressively researched debut, attorney Schindler offers a sprawling, haunted narrative about a personal quest that was sparked by the passing of her father, long embittered by an “addiction to litigation in pursuit of what, he felt, he and the family were still owed because of the disruptions of war.” In the 19th century, the Schindlers, Tyrolean Jews, found success as distillers while riding out waves of antisemitism. Their civic-mindedness was epitomized by the author’s great uncle, who served in the Austro-Hungarian military during World War I. In the 1920s, the family opened a cafe that became central to the cultural life of Innsbruck. Things changed drastically in the 1930s, culminating in a vicious attack on Schindler’s grandfather during Kristallnacht in 1938 (which she discovered her father only pretended to have witnessed). After this, most family members fled to England or elsewhere, though several were murdered during the Holocaust. A local Nazi official took over the family villa, and the cafe was turned into “the most important Nazi watering hole in town.” Beyond the compelling personal details, the author chillingly documents how the livelihoods of Austrian Jews were destroyed, “systematically stripped of their assets, at bargain-basement prices.” Schindler brings the faded figures of her forebears to life via extensive archival research, but by returning to her misanthropic father’s presence, she also unearths fascinating digressions. His most outlandish claims proved accurate—e.g., regarding one uncle who received unlikely protection after providing medical care to a teenage Hitler’s mother. “Nothing accords with the father I knew—except for the troubling absence of truth,” writes the author. “But then again, these were such times of dislocation for millions, and of trading old identities for new ones in the post-war world.” Throughout, Schindler writes vividly about representation, memory, and the aftermath of atrocity.
A significant addition to the literature on the Holocaust.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-88162-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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 short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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