Affectionate, with a bracing air of locality—the kind of microhistory that will yield gold for more sweeping history...
Masin’s portrait of his father, a renowned athlete of northern New Jersey in the ’30s and ’40s.
As historians turn more and more to intimately drawn, tightly focused stories of the Everyman to provide meaning and texture to the progress of time, this biography is just the kind of material they will seek out. Masin has written a loving story of his father, who, like all good fathers, was an exceptional man in his son’s eyes: generous (except with allowances), gentle, attentive and full of quirks and eccentricities. But the senior Masin, known as “Swede,” was also a star athlete—state champion in the shot put, voted most outstanding state player in basketball and All-American in soccer (when he happened to pick up the sport) and captain of three teams in college—as well as humble and a gentleman. So powerful and pervasive was Swede’s image in New Jersey that Philip Roth took him as the starting point for his character Swede Levov in American Pastoral. Like Masin’s father, Roth also graduated from Weequahic High School in Newark, N.J., and it is in drawing that city’s Weequahic section that Masin steps outside the personal and tackles the psychogeographic. He inspects not only the lay of this particular land, but the day-to-day life of his father’s part of town: where he hung out, the street life, school, socializing, food, architecture, theater, sledding in the park, liberal politics and more. Masin also explores how Swede was “this nice Jewish boy, living in a wonderful Jewish neighborhood, with kind Jewish parents,” a kid who rarely gave his parents grief, “but marrying a shiksa, well, that was devastating.” His parents managed to survive the devastation and the book pays nearly as close attention to Estelle’s Italian background as it does to Swede’s; a feisty, outspoken family, though Masin’s most evocative memory is the spaghetti and meatballs. Playfully teasing portrayals of the author’s brother and sisters adds a satisfying completeness to the Swede’s impact.
Affectionate, with a bracing air of locality—the kind of microhistory that will yield gold for more sweeping history projects.Pub Date: July 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1440144356
Page Count: 236
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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