The emotional toll of silence and victimhood, rendered through intimate detail and rich historical context.
Through the stories of three fortunate Jewish girls—one Polish, one French, one Dutch—the author reveals “hidden children” as an unexplored facet of Holocaust research.
A versatile writer known for his Harvey Blissberg mysteries and other offbeat works (A Buffalo in the House: A True Story of a Man, an Animal and the American West, 2007, etc.), Rosen enters the lives of these three girls and others hidden at enormous peril during World War II. The three made their getaway from Nazi persecution with the help of Christians, and they were instructed in how to be quiet, obedient and confused about their identities. Five-year-old Selma Schwarzwald and her mother, Laura, were able to escape the Lvov ghetto in 1942 after husband Daniel bought them Christian identification papers before he was taken away and never heard from again. The resourceful mother grilled her fair-haired daughter on their new identities, as well as on the Catholic catechism, and fled to Krakow, then to Leming, where Laura, with her fluent German, found work translating for an SS man. Six-year-old Flora Hillel, at school in Nice, France, did not raise her hand in class in September 1943 when the teacher asked which children were Jews. Her fearful mother promptly deposited her in a Catholic monastery, where she received rigorous religious training and later lived with and was adopted by a French-Swedish couple and became Flora Hogman; she never heard from her mother again. Carla Heijmans moved around from one safe house to another with some of the remaining family members, much like the family of Anne Frank—except the Heijmans were not found out, and thus Carla carried the guilt of surviving when two-thirds of Europe’s Jewry did not. Rosen examines how the lives of these hidden children turned out; many survivors went into “helping professions” and never spoke of their experiences.
The emotional toll of silence and victimhood, rendered through intimate detail and rich historical context.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229710-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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