By authority of his excellent prose, discomfiting honesty, risky form, and shattering fidelity to the traps of remembering the nearly unbearable, Breznitz has produced a Holocaust memoir that stands with the best of them. An academic psychologist (The New School and the Univ. of Haifa), Breznitz brings more than a hint of velleity to his account that will remind some readers, with cause, of Primo Levi. But unlike Levi, Breznitz was not himself at Auschwitz. His Czech parents were, though—and with moving foresight they had arranged to convert to Catholicism so their daughter and son might live out the war sheltered in a convent orphanage. Life in the orphanage is grim; Breznitz is bullied and, in turn, bullies; the nuns know he is Jewish but he remains in mortal terror of taking off his underwear in case one of his fellow ``orphans'' might discover the fact and give him away. The ambiguity of survival is made indelible by two incidents in particular: Breznitz's knack for remembering whole Latin prayers is noticed by the nuns and the local prelate, who link it with the legend prophesying a future Pope arising from a Jewish convert. But the author's intelligence also is nearly his undoing: One Christmas Eve, the local German commandant visits and is serenaded; when he asks if anyone knows ``Silent Night'' in German, Breznitz's sister unthinkingly moves forward, her brother joining her in solidarity—and, as they sing, it occurs to them that the only Czechs who commonly knew German in that village were Jews, and that they have just given themselves away. And in fact they have: The German commandant leans forward and tells them not to worry, their parents will be coming back. Breznitz's narration and knowledge of psychological shadings make this scene and others heart-stopping and universal in a way few books of this kind manage to do. Likely to be a classic of Holocaust literature: not to be missed.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-40403-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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