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 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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