A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter’s love.
Unearthing her grandparents’ mysterious 50-year estrangement forms the foundation for translator and editor Mouillot’s memoir.
From the time she was a young girl, the author understood that she came from a turbulent family of Holocaust survivors and that her estranged grandparents’ relationship was odd. The family’s emotional terrain consisted of “fights and bitterness, illness and injury, trauma, bad memories, and crazy grudges.” Her mother knew little about their relationship, except for the fact that they hadn’t spoken in almost 40 years. As an adolescent, Mouillot had been close to her grandmother, but it was not until she was 14 that she visited her difficult grandfather alone in Switzerland for the first time. After this visit, the author initially comprehended the volatility surrounding her grandparents’ relationship. The combination of her grandfather’s strong negative feelings for his ex-wife and her grandmother’s vague responses to Mouillot’s inquiries about their relationship prompted more questions. Through convoluted conversations with her mother and grandparents, the author began piecing together the puzzle of their traumatic daily lives. Her grandmother was a physician during the war, and her grandfather served as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials. After they met, they married, had a baby and moved to a house in the countryside in southern France. Putting together the family story involved many discussions, delving into old family letters and archival research; the process took Mouillot more than 10 years. Before completing the family story, her grandfather lost his memory to dementia, but her grandmother was able to read an early version of the book. “While I was trying to remember,” writes the author, “Grandma was urging me to forget, to put it down on paper and get on with the labor or living.”
A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter’s love.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0804140645
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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