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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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