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MEMOIRS OF A WARSAW GHETTO FIGHTER

The candid, fast-moving memoir of a significant member of the Warsaw Ghetto's fighting underground. This is a marked contrast to Yitzhak Zuckerman's recent A Surplus of Memory (1993), also translated by Harshav. Although they worked together in the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), the personalities of ``Antek'' and ``Kazik,'' to use their noms de guerre, could not have been more different. The older Antek (Zuckerman), head of the ZOB, was a consummate organizer, diplomat, and archivist, while the younger Kazik (Rotem) was a lover and fighter. Never hesitating to lead dangerous street-level missions dressed as a Gestapo collaborator or to venture through the vast Warsaw sewer system, Kazik ``argued bitterly'' with Antek against saving piles of records from the burning ghetto: ``And why endanger ourselves? For papers? For `history'?'' Because he looked enough like a member of the Polish gentile working class among whom he had grown up, Kazik operated as a tough member of the Polish resistance who could intimidate uncooperative Jews and gentiles. After the ghetto was systematically destroyed, Kazik, in fact, didn't hesitate to join the anti-Semitic Armia Krajowa Polish underground in its short-lived uprising against the Germans. His chutzpah is at its best when he cajoles these partisans into keeping up the fight so as not to be shamed by the superior resistance of the city's underfed and undersupplied Jews. He had the sensitivity to feel guilty when gorging on a farmer's banquet while his family and friends starved in their bunkers, but this guileless man of action wasn't one to pass up a good meal, an opportunity for revenge, or a love affair. Such qualities color this memoir with the personal, so that it transcends a historical document. The record of these desperate, brave days is enriched by the injection of Kazik's salty, active personality. (4 pages photos, not seen).

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-300-05797-0

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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