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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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