A fine-grained, scholarly exhumation of the buried cultural and especially medical lore that helped shape Kafka's conflicted self-understanding as a Jew in turn-of-the-century Austria and Czechoslovakia. Gilman (Jewish Self-Hatred, 1986, etc.) seeks to reconstruct the lost ``discourses'' of race, gender, and disease in Kafka's time. He argues that Kafka's anxieties about his Jewish identity stem directly from his anxieties about his body and its infirmities, both real and imaginary. Always underweight, nervous, and much inclined to heed the health fads of his day, Kafka fretted a great deal over his health. Then, as if in fulfillment of his expectations, he got really sick. In 1917 he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that killed him in 1924. Kafka regarded his disease as the bodily expression of some deeper spiritual malady. Gilman sensibly proposes that the writer had internalized medical and popular anti-Semitic myths about a supposedly inbred genetic legacy that predisposed Jews to certain illnesses (especially syphilis and tuberculosis) and resulted in what was thought to be the degenerate feminization of European culture at the end of the 19th century. Jewish men in particular, supposedly less robust than their virile ``Aryan'' counterparts, were thought to embody a somatic decline into sickly effeminacy. This general picture of Kafka's own self- understanding is not new. What Gilman offers in the way of fresh insight is a wealth of concrete detail from the prevailing (mis)conceptions of the time's learned and not-so-learned culture. However, Gilman is unable to parlay his deepened understanding of the cultural background into new or revealing readings of Kafka's texts. A work as central to the Kafka canon as The Castle, for example, is dealt with on a single page, which contends vaguely that the novel's setting may have something to do with tuberculosis spas of the day. Excellent, often engrossing as cultural history; disappointing as literary criticism. (illustrations)
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-415-91177-X
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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