Equally appealing to Jewish scholars, military history buffs, and readers looking for a dramatic page-turner.
One man’s heroic flight across war-torn Europe.
Polish-born Jewish historian Ainsztein (1917–81) lived through titanic events. At the onset of WWII, he was literally starving as a medical student in Belgium, good preparation for the epic trek he embarked on during the war. The young Anglophile applied for and was given permission by the British Air Ministry to join the Royal Air Force, but it took him more than a year to get across Europe to Gibraltar, from which he finally reached Britain for his RAF training. During that year, he dodged German snipers and French police, then survived months in a concentration camp in Franco’s Spain. The theme of Jewish resistance, so important in Ainsztein’s historical works (The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, not reviewed, etc.), also informs his stirring memoir. As he fights with the British, the author realizes that his childhood in Poland inculcated within him a sense of inferiority because, in Wilno, he could never fight back against the brutish anti-Semitism he encountered every day. When he finally becomes a turret gunner, his dreams have been realized, but he also discovers that he’s lost his ties to a country in which he was never welcome. Ainsztein’s prose directly conveys with thoughtful nuance even the grimmest developments. In one story, a man just about to be released from Spanish detention, packing up his belongings, forgets a crucial camp rule: never stand by a window, or the guards will shoot you. Ainsztein doesn’t portray the guards as monsters—they are poor and receive a bonus for each prisoner killed—but he also doesn’t scant the monstrousness of their actions. In an age of self-indulgent memoirs, it’s a pleasure to read the firsthand account of a man who doesn’t need to fall back on rhetoric to render his experiences important.
Equally appealing to Jewish scholars, military history buffs, and readers looking for a dramatic page-turner.Pub Date: June 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50757-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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