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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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