Poet and children’s author Wachtel views her mother’s remarkable life, first recounted in The Story of Blima: A Holocaust Survivor (2005), through a creative new lens.
In 1941, Blima Weisstuch, the eldest daughter of a shoe merchant in Dombrowe, Poland, was abducted by the Gestapo before her mother’s eyes, shattering forever a domestic Eden of fresh-faced sisters, quarreling brothers, ritual dinners and the warmth of a mother’s embrace. Transported by cattle car with hundreds of other Jewish women to Grünberg labor camp, Blima is made to sew German uniforms and begins, slowly, to starve. Only a Catholic guard with a mothering instinct guarantees her survival by slipping her crusts of bread. Finally liberated and reunited with a brother, Blima marries a fellow Holocaust survivor, emigrates to Brooklyn and gives birth to Shirley, a coddled mother’s girl, who eventually grows up to write this richly imagined memoir. Wachtel (In the Mellow Light, 2009) structures her story in flashbacks narrated by Blima, Shirley and Betty—the name Blima takes in America. Each woman’s story propels the others’ over five decades. Betty and her husband, Chiel, run a Laundromat and produce a son. Shirley marries and becomes a writer. As family tables are set, the past bubbles up until an aging Blima faces death. Among Wachtel’s adroitly rendered scenes of Jewish domestic and communal life, of wartime Poland and 1950s New York, are several small masterpieces; a baby is accidentally dropped and dies, an apple is menacingly peeled in a labor camp, ice melts under a woman’s exhausted body in a Polish forest, a father weeps openly over his failure to provide, matzos are broken and challah is dipped. Wachtel entwines the singular and the ordinary with quiet lyricism. In the end, the eponymous shoes are upstaged; it is food that beckons, vanishes and sates. From the raisin breads of the Old World to the tenderly saved chicken bones of the new, food binds mothers to daughters and women to the world. Wachtel tells us she cannot fathom the Holocaust. That food is love and manna is life—this she proves. An evocative, moveable feast plumbing past and present with equal grace.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463674151
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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