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
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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