A simple yet charming tale that captures the hopes and challenges of the immigrant experience for Jewish women.
In this debut historical fiction, young teen Fanny Tatch escapes from her shtetl near Kiev to embark on a new life in America.
Rolling out strudels, 13-year-old Fanny Tatch feels like her life is rolling away, too. She’d like to receive an education like her brother, but she instead awaits another fate as a Jewish girl living in the Ukraine in the 1890s. Her father plans an arranged marriage for her, and worst of all, her mother is very ill. While visiting her dying sister, Fanny’s aunt Freda ignites her niece’s imagination with news that she and Freda’s much older husband, Avram, plan to immigrate soon to America. After Mama dies, Papa marries Ida, who schemes for Fanny to marry her oafish nephew. Then Avram dies, and Freda suggests that Fanny travel to America with her in his place. They quietly make their way out of the country, sliding past questioning Cossacks and arriving by ship in Manhattan, where Avram’s cousin Sophie and husband, Mendel, charge them room and board to stay in the couple’s Lower East Side apartment. Sophie also gets them jobs with her in the garment industry but becomes enraged when overseer Mike takes a shine to Freda and allows Fanny to work part time so she can attend school. Mendel also rather strangely withholds letters from Papa. These tensions ultimately drive Fanny and Freda out onto the streets, but it’s a blessing in disguise, as Fanny finds the keys to truly start their new lives. Constain, a retired teacher and school librarian, has drawn inspiration from her grandmother, also named Fanny Tatch, to develop this work of historical fiction. There’s a vibrant veracity throughout her smooth-flowing narrative, with Constain effectively conveying Jewish cultural details as well as Fanny’s wonder and engagement in learning. The story at times lacks nuance, though, with some rather one-dimensional villains and Cinderella-like turns of fortune. Overall, however, Constain has crafted a lovely coming-of-age novel that pays homage to her family history.
A simple yet charming tale that captures the hopes and challenges of the immigrant experience for Jewish women.Pub Date: March 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494928780
Page Count: 198
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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