A son’s story, a Jewish story, an American story.
Prize-winning journalist Freedman reconstructs his mother’s biography.
Freedman’s mother died of breast cancer more than a quarter of a century ago—indeed, his stepmother has been a part of his life longer than his mother was. And now, in middle age, he decided to learn what he could about Eleanor Hatkin Freedman, her life before marriage and motherhood. The result is terrifically intimate: a son growing up in Jewish New York at mid-century, and a son, decades later, coming into his grief through a process of research. The account of Eleanor’s mother’s efforts to get her relatives out of Nazi Europe is heroic, harrowing, and heartbreaking—though not intimate to the point of myopia. There’s also American history here, as when Freedman explains about Eleanor’s following the model of Rosie the Riveter, or about the pre-rationing runs on stores. And there’s the transfixing undercurrent of soap opera. Freedman’s mother fell in love with a gentile and would have married him had her own mother not reacted histrionically. Instead, she hastily married a good Jewish boy, only to have that marriage annulled not long after the chuppah. Her subsequent courtship with Freedman’s father is summarized in a few paragraphs, and the entirety of Eleanor’s second marriage is skipped—until the chapter about her death. This large omission, surprisingly, works. You get no sense of being cheated of mother-and-wife, since Freedman (Columbia Univ./Jew vs. Jew, 2000, etc.) has so clearly established that his purpose has been to uncover an earlier Eleanor, an earlier era. Nor should anyone skip the concluding note on sources. There, Freedman throws down a gauntlet: he is concerned, he says, by the trend in memoir and family history to blur fact and fiction, to invent what you can’t remember. His reconstruction, he insists, is history, and as factually accurate, and historiographically informed, as possible.
A son’s story, a Jewish story, an American story.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2735-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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