The sins of the fathers are visited on their children, indeed. Eerkens’ poignant book sheds new light on the history of...
A generational memoir of war and its long-lasting effects on descendants.
History, the old saying goes, is written by the victors. The fortunes of the losers often go unnoticed, particularly if the losers are associated with a bad cause. So it was in the case of one side of Eerkens’ family, her grandfather a member of a Dutch nationalist party with ties to the Nazi occupiers. She writes dolefully of discovering an article of his that she turned up in the National Library, “someone who supposedly had Jewish colleagues and friends whom he spoke highly of, writing clearly anti-Semitic, racist nonsense for a racist NSB publication.” Understandably, that grandfather did not wish to discuss his past, and the author’s mother was too young to comprehend events, though her older siblings recalled being shunned and cursed by their neighbors. On the other side of the family and politics was her father, imprisoned with his family in the Dutch East Indies; Eerkens focuses closely on the fact that the Japanese military ran “brutal labor camps for civilian prisoners including women and children,” to terrible effect. The author examines the psychology of loss on the part of children caught helplessly in tumultuous events. In the case of her parents, who met as adults after the war and raised their family in California, their experiences lingered in large and small things—e.g., her mother’s frugality, explained by her aunt with the meaningful phrase, “we aren’t just automatically entitled to nice things.” Privations and fears became ancestral memories “imprinted on my genes.” Eerkens’ work takes on a particularly timely note when, in closing, she notes the rise of a new wave of nationalism, a time when “people I know and care about have endorsed candidates and political positions that I find unconscionable,” reverberating again through the generations.
The sins of the fathers are visited on their children, indeed. Eerkens’ poignant book sheds new light on the history of World War II.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-11779-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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