The episodic and deeply conflicted memories of a Jewish woman's childhood in France during WW II. Meyers, a poet now residing in the US, was born in Paris in the mid-1930s to poor immigrants from Poland. Although she was raised in a home with little Jewish content—her parents were both secular nonbelievers—when the Germans marched on Paris she became aware of her Jewishness in a starkly painful manner. She was forced to wear a yellow star on her coat, harassed by German soldiers, abused by her former playmates, and denied access to stores and public parks. When the Germans began rounding up and deporting French Jews, Meyers was saved by the family's Catholic landlady, who helped the girl escape to the French countryside, where she remained until after the liberation of Paris. (Her parents survived the war, her mother as a member of the Resistance, her father as a French Army prisoner of war.) Although Meyers never faces the issue directly, this memoir is largely an accounting of her profound religious conflicts. While her exposure to Judaism was limited and mostly unpleasant, she saw Catholicism—in the form of her courageous landlady, Madame Marie, and in her experience of posing as a Catholic during her years in the countryside—as her salvation. In fact, she felt this literally for a time, and worried that pretending to be Catholic would not be enough to insure her a place in Paradise. Later, Meyers held a secret correspondence with a Catholic priest and entertained dreams of becoming a nun, although she gave up that idea when her parents discovered her letters and berated her for forgetting her roots. While Meyers doesn't acknowledge it, the problem seems to be that she never had any roots to begin with. Meyers's failure to confront her ambivalence about religion directly makes her story feel incomplete.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-295-97576-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Univ. of Washington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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
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