A touching family account expressed in unadorned but emotionally arresting language.
A debut memoir chronicles a woman’s struggle to make peace with her father’s death in World War II.
In 1945, Reynolds’ father was killed during the Battle of the Bulge when his jeep hit a land mine near Luxembourg while he was serving as a soldier in World War II. She remembers the dark day her mother received a telegram relating the grim news, and their shared inconsolableness, an episode poignantly related by the author. Reynolds’ mother was remarried in 1947 to a painter, Sam Joseph, and gradually the family was reconstituted to erase the painful remembrance of the author’s transformative loss. A photograph and the fatigue cap that her father gave her before he decamped for war suddenly disappeared from her room. Reynolds’ family stopped visiting her paternal grandparents, opting instead to spend time with Joseph’s parents. And then in 1951, when the author was 11 years old, her family moved from its Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan to a house in the suburbs of Connecticut. A Jew accustomed to being surrounded by others of her faith, Reynolds learned to become an outlier, often the target of malicious taunts by her Christian peers. But she was eventually reunited with her father’s side of the family when she met Anna Hoech, who had kept in touch with those relatives and had worked as a nanny for the younger siblings of Reynolds’ mother. The author became close friends with her Aunt Greta, who escaped Nazi-occupied France, and was inspired to learn as much as she could about her father and his family’s history. In 1999, married and living in Florida, she joined the American War Orphans Network, an organization dedicated to supporting others who have experienced similar losses. Reynolds writes in the sparest prose, unembellished by literary invention and almost childlike, which imbues it with a kind of moral power (“Greta…became my favorite aunt. We even looked alike—the same coloring, similar build, and kindred smiles. The connection between us was instantaneous. I knew at once that she would become one of the most important people in my life”). The memoir, featuring old black-and-white photographs, meanders shiftlessly sometimes, wandering too far from the story’s main themes. But the author’s profound sense of abandonment is affectingly portrayed as well as the solace she found in the investigation of her father’s lineage.
A touching family account expressed in unadorned but emotionally arresting language.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4808-4493-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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