by Nancy Kohner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 2009
Powerful and tender remembrances etched against history’s monstrous reality.
A Jewish family in Czechoslovakia leaves a poignant trail through the turmoil and horror of Europe’s great wars.
The author, who died in 2006 just after finishing this book for publication in the United Kingdom, spent two decades researching it. Her father was a refugee who came to England from the Bohemian town of Podersam in 1939, married the author’s English mother and made a successful career. But he’d retained Old World ways, dressing up for no particular occasion and always with a rosebud in his lapel. He’d been reticent about his background, finally showing concern just as his faculties were slipping before he died in 1987. Then boxes of memorabilia were unearthed among his possessions. “From before the First World War until the end of the Second and beyond,” Kohner writes, “the family must have saved thousands of documents.” She became a self-compelled hostage to this avalanche of information, touched by the intimacy of personal letters trailing back in time. She discovered the threads of the lives of her grandparents, Heinrich and Valerie Kohner, as well as her uncles and aunts. Woven into the narrative are many revelations: The Kohners spoke German and thought of themselves as Germans, not Czechs (Podersam was actually in imperial Austro-Hungary at her father’s birth in 1905). They were straightforwardly Jewish, yet the children hung up stockings on St. Nicholas Day. Uncle Franz fought for Germany as an artillery officer in the World War I and was seriously wounded in Italy; Aunt Berta married a gentile and lost close touch with the family, prompting a depression that led to her suicide. Eventually, the shadow of Hitler’s Germany fell on the Podersam doorstep. Heinrich, the patriarch, died in Prague on the eve of war. For Valerie, the road ended in the gas chamber at the Treblinka death camp. Kohner faces this unthinkable fate with the same empathy and sensitivity she displays throughout toward the family she never knew.
Powerful and tender remembrances etched against history’s monstrous reality.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-018-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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