A standout wartime memoir, and the inspiration of the Golden Globewinning film of the same title. Perel, now an Israeli businessman, survived the Holocaust in a most improbable way. Facility with German and Russian allowed the teenage Solly, separated from his family, to be given shelter first at a Soviet orphanage and later, incredibly, in Germany's premier Hitler Youth institution. On the perilous way from one ideological extreme to another, Perel was rounded up by attacking Wehrmacht troops, passed himself off as an ethnic German, and was adopted as the mascot of a mechanized unit. The exquisite psychological drama of being a Jew in Nazi clothing intensifies when he is shipped back to Germany. The lonely boy, who took the name Jupp, found himself bonding with Nazi friends and learning—even teaching—loathsome Nazi propaganda about Jews. He was shaken from any confidence in his lucky angel whenever his circumcision or absent birth records came to the fore. But he risked all to visit the Lodz ghetto to search for his parents during his Christmas vacation. In a suicidal break from his usual self-control, he unburdened himself of his terrible secret to a couple of Germans. His parents died in a concentration camp, but with the help of two surviving brothers, Perel finally got to establish his true identity in the newborn state of Israel. As narrator, Perel constantly points out poignant ironies and flashes forward to postwar visits with the principal characters. We get to see many Nazis and Jews react after the war with disbelief when they discover that Solly/Jupp was, indeed, Jewish. An epilogue touches on Perel's cathartic, present-day encounters with Jews and Nazis (he now lectures about fascism), but the weight of this memorable psychological thriller lies in the interior drama. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 27, 1997
ISBN: 0-471-17218-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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