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 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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
