Charring and eloquent.
A dark, distressful, and deeply felt memoir of life with father—and its aftershocks—by National Book Award–winner Nuland (How We Die, 1994, etc.).
Meyer Nudelman, a Jewish immigrant from the Pale, was, to put it mildly, a difficult man: moody with an explosive temper, an outlander in his own home, full of brittle pride. His accent and physical disabilities mortified young Sherwin, while his rages smote the boy to the soul; in one memorable explosion, Nuland (Surgery/Yale School of Medicine) sees that his father, so degraded by the miserable toil of his daily life, must in turn degrade his own son with a flurry of verbal abuse. Yet the Nudelmans’ stormy apartment also provided shelter, and Meyer’s weakness was his power. Impressively evocative of life in the Jewish East Bronx during the 1940s, the story hinges on Sherwin’s move to break away from his father’s smothering emotional grasp by attending medical school at Yale. But anguishing episodes of profound melancholia (like grotesque fogs with the “muffled mocking tones of a vengeful enemy”) roil his life so severely that Nuland is slated for a lobotomy while a clinical resident at Yale and barely escapes the knife. The subsequent revelation that his father is suffering from the fallout of untreated syphilis is not enough to erase his feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy, his fixations and the guilt, “the din and deluge of that rampaging stampede of obsessional ideations” that resulted in Nuland’s hospitalization. Lost in America probes the effect Meyer had on his life in the hope that by understanding his father Nuland might thereby understand a part of himself that has begged comprehension. The “journey” ends with a measure of balance: the author finds his own life by finding a way into and out of his father’s—and if it took 70 years to achieve, the time seems short for the amount of work involved.
Charring and eloquent.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41294-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
