A well-written book full of desperate hope, intense fear, and a demand for vigilance against the mentality of hate.
Scheyer (1886-1949), arts editor of Vienna’s Neues Wiener Tagblatt until his expulsion in 1938, describes his desperate struggle to remain free after the Anschluss.
The book, a carbon copy kept by the translator’s grandmother, Scheyer’s wife, was discovered in an attic in the home of Scheyer’s stepson and is now available, unedited as witness to the kindness and cruelty of the time. The author began writing the book in 1943 in the family’s hiding place in the Dordogne and completed it in 1945. In 1938, moving to France was the way to avoid the Germans’ strict regulations for Jews. Scheyer, his wife, Grete, and their faithful Czech companion, Slava, faced and outran constant danger. The writing is fraught with the emotional turmoil of trying to stay a step ahead of the Nazis. Scheyer’s descriptions, after the fact, of the inability to relax, the constant fear that someone would denounce them, knowing a knock on the door could be the end, and even their inability to come out of hiding after liberation are gripping. His constant question—“how could it all have happened?”—hovers over all. Even at first, while he was in Paris to buy exit visas, he speaks of the desperation and pain of being a refugee living on charity. He tells of the miracles, as well, and muses on the fates of his friends to show how close we become in adversity. Suffering a wide range of experiences—from passeurs who deserted them to contacts with the resistance—they finally found angels in the Rispal family, who led them to safety in a convent. Scheyer’s stepson destroyed the original copy of the book due to its intense anti-German sentiments; thankfully, the work survived.
A well-written book full of desperate hope, intense fear, and a demand for vigilance against the mentality of hate.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-27288-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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