A readable, personable study and a scathing indictment of Dutch passivity in the face of occupation, though without being...
The nephew of a Dutch Jewish dance teacher sent to Auschwitz gradually uncovers her tale of survival and triumph.
Glaser’s name appears solely on the title page of this work, though he has taken his aunt Rosie’s wartime diary and fleshed it out for publication, adding numerous photographs and letters for an overall sense of the consummate spirit of his aunt. Having lived in Germany during her earliest years, when her father worked in a German factory, Rosie was fluent in German; the nonreligious Jewish family eventually moved to the Netherlands, where Rosie became infatuated with dancing. After her first love, a pilot, was killed on a flight in 1936, Rosie used her dance skills to make a new life for herself and ensure her self-preservation throughout the years to come. She became the wife of a dance instructor, helping him to run his thriving studio until the Nazi invaders made it increasingly difficult for Jews to work or even move around the cities. A flirtation with another man turned disastrous: Both men, the first out of jealousy, the other from venality, betrayed her to the occupiers. Yet every step of the way, from deportation to imprisonment in Auschwitz, Rosie managed to sway fate her way—or, as she states: “I quickly assessed the situation and tried to regain some semblance of control over my life.” Alternating with her first-person narrative is the journey the Catholic-raised author took toward grasping his Jewish heritage and confronting the various skittish relatives for the truth, including the aged Rosie herself.
A readable, personable study and a scathing indictment of Dutch passivity in the face of occupation, though without being able to read the actual diary, readers may wonder about the liberties taken by the nephew.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-53770-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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