A well-deserved celebration of a courageous and determined public intellectual.
Biography of a prolific Czech-born writer who bore eloquent witness to the Holocaust.
Translator and poet Filkins (Literature and Creative Writing/Bard Coll. at Simon’s Rock; The View We’re Granted, 2012, etc.) offers an authoritative, deeply empathetic life of H.G. Adler (1910-1988), a poet, fiction writer, and scholar who devoted himself to chronicling the atrocities of the Holocaust. Beginning in 1942, Adler was held for 32 months in Theresienstadt, described by Filkins as “a holding space in which to extract wealth, labor, and camouflage for the extermination camps that it fed”; he later was imprisoned in Auschwitz and two other concentration camps. “If I survive, then I will describe it,” he vowed, both as a well-researched work of scholarship and “in poetic manner” as fiction. “To live as a participant and to live as an observer,” he wrote to his wife, who, along with her family and Adler’s parents, perished in the camps. “It’s really like they are two different people.” Adler began to record his experiences even while at Theresienstadt, collecting, as well, whatever documents he could find regarding the camp’s administration. When he realized he was being sent to Auschwitz, he left the papers with Leo Baeck, the most esteemed rabbi in Germany, who arrived at Theresienstadt in 1943 and whose prominence Adler believed might insure his survival. In addition to safeguarding the material, Baeck, who “maintained that Judaism was a religion free of dogma,” helped Adler to think through his connection to religion and identity as a Jew. Filkins describes in harrowing detail the suffering and sadism experienced by camp inmates: grueling slave labor, starvation, disease, whippings, and the ever present specter of death. After the war, Adler worked tirelessly on his writing. By 1948, he completed Theresienstadt 1941-1945, which was followed by several novels. Although he failed to find support from major publishers, by the time he died, more than 20 books had appeared, and he had forged a career as a lecturer on Jewish culture and the Holocaust.
A well-deserved celebration of a courageous and determined public intellectual.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-022238-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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