A judicious, balanced assessment that makes palpable both Kafka’s personal weirdness and his artistic mastery.
An astute analysis, by the German editor of Kafka’s collected works, of the remarkable half-decade in which the Prague-based modernist wrote his best-known stories.
Given the impact of Kafka’s fraught relations with his family, especially his father, on his writing, it’s odd that Stach chooses to begin this first entry in a projected three-volume biography in 1910, when Kafka was 27 years old. His days were passed as an insurance official, a commitment he dutifully fulfilled while devoting his nights to his art. Stach ably delineates the writer’s peculiar personality—vegetarian, hypochondriac, utterly estranged from the bourgeois preoccupations of his Jewish relatives, yet unable to even move out of the family apartment—without ever exploring the childhood roots of his stunted character. This major caveat aside, the biographer does a brilliant job of examining in depth the adult Kafka’s transmutation of his neuroses into exacting, unsettling fiction that captured the unease of a world confronting modernity but still constricted by 19th-century conventions. Discussing “The Metamorphosis,” The Trial and “In the Penal Colony,” Stach pays equal attention to themes, autobiographical content and Kafka’s precise prose and resonant metaphors. He also acutely examines the writer’s on-again-off-again romance with Felice Bauer, conducted primarily through letters (this up-to-date career woman had a demanding job in Berlin and her ambivalent suitor seldom left Prague). Though Kafka rarely noted world events in his diaries and letters, he was deeply affected by the Yiddish theater and Zionism; Stach assesses the influence of these historical trends as ably as he delineates the vibrant German-language publishing scene. This vivid recreation of a complex man and his milieu closes at an appropriately uncertain moment: one year into WWI, which spurred Kafka’s strongest efforts yet toward autonomy and a life dedicated wholly to literature, even as it made such a life virtually impossible.
A judicious, balanced assessment that makes palpable both Kafka’s personal weirdness and his artistic mastery.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-100752-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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