A memoir traces the history of a Jewish family from Russia to New England.
Novelist Skoy (What Survives, 2016) turns to nonfiction in this exploration of her family history that presents a panorama of Jewish life, from Bershad, a shtetl in what is now Ukraine, to the whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The central character in the book is Skoy's father, Nathan Mitnick, who is introduced as an ailing 91-year-old man so intent on dying that he asks his daughter to poison him with potassium. “Have I ever known him?” the author wonders. “How well does one ever know another human being? Has there always been a part of him that stayed behind in those frozen places of his past where I’ll never walk?” Life in Bershad, then part of Russia, was brutal, with one of Mitnick’s uncles beaten to death by the anti-Semitic sons of local farmers and another burned to death in a synagogue while Cossacks guarded the doors. “If this is the best God can do for his chosen people, I wish he’d choose somebody else,” Mitnick’s father would say. Mitnick eventually fled with his mother and brother in a hay wagon, ending up in the U.S., where he fashioned a career as an ophthalmologist, raising his two daughters in Philadelphia and New Bedford. With a keen ear for dialogue, Skoy skillfully portrays the joys and sorrows of family members’ lives and the idiosyncrasies of the relatives and others who revolved around them. There’s Uncle Morris, “casting an eerie shadow between the kitchen and the living room, like an apparition from Auschwitz,” and Aunt Kathie, who converted to Roman Catholicism, even going to a convent to become a nun. In one particularly comical episode, Skoy’s mother makes the best of the situation after she crashes the family car into a drugstore during a driving lesson. “As long as we’re here, we might as well pick up my prescription,” she reasons. And at the center of the action, there’s Mitnick, who, memorably, can’t fathom why Sammy Davis Jr. would convert to Judaism. “Whatever could’ve made him want to be Jewish?” he asks. “He has to be nuts.”
The author deftly captures the humor and pathos of Jewish life and the many quirks of her colorful family.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: IPBooks
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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