A revealing epistolary portrait of one of WW II's most daring heroes and mysterious victims. Several books record how this Swedish diplomat in Hungary intrepidly rescued more than 100,000 Jews bound for extermination camps. But no book until this one (to be published on the 50th anniversary of his disappearance into the Soviet gulags) has offered such an intimate look at who Wallenberg really was. His formative years, it could be argued, occurred on the University of Michigan campus, where the young architect student was much affected by the ``can do'' American spirit that contrasted with his continental education. To give nature (vs. nurture) some due, we can credit much of his individualism and adventurousness to Gustaf Wallenberg, the ``Dearest Grandfather'' to whom most of Raoul's letters are addressed. Later correspondence bears postmarks from locations as far-flung as Mexico City and Johannesburg, but Wallenberg's epistles from Palestine are especially instructive for those trying to gauge whether or not his heroic period in Budapest was motivated by any specifically pro-Jewish attitude. On his way to a banking position in Haifa in 1936 he writes, ``Knowing the average South African Jew, I'm a bit pessimistic, but the trip may turn out to be pleasant nonetheless.'' Once there, however, he states that the Jews of Palestine ``are optimistic to a man, and were energy a guarantee for success the results would be excellent.'' While not all the scores of letters, memos, and dispatches here are of interest, overall, Wallenberg's personality comes through forcefully. The man who repeatedly risked his life to save Jews from Nazis and Hungarian fascists appears in these documents to be someone who enjoyed thwarting Eichmann and lesser bureaucrats, and who admired the Zionist enterprise and those who could help it. A valuable addition to Wallenberg and Holocaust literature, shedding new light on a shining exception that proves the darkest of rules. (16 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1995
ISBN: 1-55970-275-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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