An intelligent, disturbing, and profoundly honest memoir.
A prizewinning poet's account of her convict father and the impact he had on his family.
Brodak (A Little Middle of the Night, 2009) was 7 the first time she stole from a store. Six years later, her father, Joseph, who was conceived in a German concentration camp, was arrested for robbing 11 banks in Michigan. Here, the author examines the tortured relationship she and her family had with her father. A gambling addict, Joseph lived life with greedy amorality. He was already married with children when he met Brodak's mother, but that did not stop him from starting a second family with her. Their relationship was a rocky one; they married and divorced twice. The second and final time they ended their union, Joseph took Brodak’s younger sister with him. While he treated her like a princess and spoiled her with fancy clothes and a Corvette, he sometimes sent the angry and confused teen back to Brodak and her mother “as punishment, or maybe to loose himself from her care during gambling binges.” During what would be the first of her father’s two jail sentences for bank robbery, the author became an expert shoplifter not because it was “good or cool” but because it was simply a way for her to make money. Later, she realized that it was really a way for her to work through the “pattern of theft that destroyed my family.” Brodak’s story is undeniably compelling, but what makes the book even more fascinating is her in-depth reflection on the gambling habit that drove her father into a life of crime. “Maybe gambling is a kind of wound-replay wound-fascination,” she writes, “because it’s so obviously unwise that it seems like self-harm.” An individual may feel empowered because of the choice involved; but for Brodak, gambling is really a form of self-harm that distracts from the hard business of living and maintaining healthy relationships.
An intelligent, disturbing, and profoundly honest memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2563-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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