A heartbreaking story of survival and emotional resilience.
A Holocaust survivor’s memoir recounts his attempts to free himself from haunting grief.
Rubin (I Am Small, I Am Big, 1995, etc.) was born into a large Jewish family in Jaworzno, a small and “somber town” in Poland, in 1924. He experienced humiliation and isolation due to the prevailing anti-Semitism of his time and place; due to his dyslexia, school was “torture,” and scholastic success proved elusive. His academic failure, particularly when it came to his Judaic studies, provoked his father’s unrelenting disapproval. The situation in Jaworzno drastically worsened after Hitler came to power, and when, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland, the town was among the first to be occupied. The author was forced to work in a coal mine before he was sent, in 1942, to a concentration camp at the age of 17. He became a self-described “survival machine” and made it through the ordeal, but many members of his family didn’t, and he and his surviving sister, Bronia, were crushed by guilt and despair. “Neither of us knew how to move on. We had nothing to look forward to, just anguish and devastation to run away from. Although we’d survived, living without a home or family in a world full of unfathomable cruelty did not feel at all like a triumph.” Rubin’s achingly poignant recollection is lovingly edited by his co-author daughter, Goodman (Straight From the Earth, 2014, etc.), who supplements his writing with her own research, including interviews with the family. Rubin vividly chronicles his heroic effort “to break free from the psychological prison I’d lived in since I was a child in a little town in Poland” and find some measure of peace, and even joy. His prose is as lucid as it is candidly confessional, and his refusal to simply succumb to self-pity is inspiring. There is, of course, no shortage of Holocaust memoirs, and readers will find that this one covers familiar ground. However, the author travels this territory with grace and intelligence, making his contribution both moving and edifying.
A heartbreaking story of survival and emotional resilience.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-878-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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