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
Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for...
A viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs, Awad’s latest may be the first (and only?) entry into the canon of MFA horror.
Samantha Heather Mackey is the single outsider among her fiction cohort at Warren University, which is populated by Bunnies. “We call them Bunnies,” she explains, “because that is what they call each other.” The Bunnies are uniform in their Bunniness: rich and hyperfeminine and aggressively childlike, fawning over each other (“Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?”), wearing kitten-printed dresses, frequenting a cafe where all the food is miniature, from the mini cupcakes to the mini sweet potato fries. Samantha is, by definition, not a Bunny. But then a note appears in her student mailbox, sinister and saccharine at once: an invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon, one of their many Bunny customs from which Samantha has always been excluded, like “Touching Tuesdays” or “making little woodland creatures out of marzipan.” And even though she despises the Bunnies and their cooing and their cloying girlishness and incomprehensible stories, she cannot resist the possibility of finally, maybe being invited into their sweet and terrifying club. Smut Salon, though, is tame compared to what the Bunnies call their “Workshop,” which, they explain, is an “experimental” and “intertextual” project that “subverts the whole concept of genre,” and also “the patriarchy of language,” and also several other combinations of creative writing buzzwords. (“This is about the Body,” a Bunny tells Samantha, upon deeming her ready to participate. “The Body performing in all its nuanced viscerality.”) As Samantha falls deeper into their twee and terrifying world—drifting from her only non-Bunny friend in the process—Awad (13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, 2016) gleefully pumps up the novel’s nightmarish quality until the boundary between perception and reality has all but dissolved completely. It’s clear that Awad is having fun here—the proof is in the gore—and her delight is contagious.
Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for everyone.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55973-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
PROFILES
In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden, generous heart.
Originally published in Sweden, this charming debut novel by Backman should find a ready audience with English-language readers.
The book opens helpfully with the following characterizations about its protagonist: “Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman’s torch.” What the book takes its time revealing is that this dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon has a heart of solid gold. Readers will see the basic setup coming a mile away, but Backman does a crafty job revealing the full vein of precious metal beneath Ove’s ribs, glint by glint. Ove’s history trickles out in alternating chapters—a bleak set of circumstances that smacks an honorable, hardworking boy around time and again, proving that, even by early adulthood, he comes by his grumpy nature honestly. It’s a woman who turns his life around the first time: sweet and lively Sonja, who becomes his wife and balances his pessimism with optimism and warmth. By 59, he's in a place of despair yet again, and it’s a woman who turns him around a second time: spirited, knowing Parvaneh, who moves with her husband and children into the terraced house next door and forces Ove to engage with the world. The back story chapters have a simple, fablelike quality, while the current-day chapters are episodic and, at times, hysterically funny. In both instances, the narration can veer toward the preachy or overly pat, but wry descriptions, excellent pacing and the juxtaposition of Ove’s attitude with his deeds add plenty of punch to balance out any pathos.
In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden, generous heart.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3801-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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