A remarkable story that resonates with intelligence and insight.
The author of The Jew Store (1998), which vividly described growing up in a small Tennessee town where her relatives were the only Jews, just as memorably recalls her peripatetic life as a war bride.
Suberman begins her story in 1939, the year recent high-school grad Stella met husband-to-be Jack at a Miami Beach park. Stella and her family were now living in Miami; her father had bought a drugstore, and she was adjusting to a larger Jewish presence. Many locals resented that presence; hotels had signs barring Jewish guests, and the country clubs blackballed Jewish applicants. Though her father was not religious, her mother was observant, and after Stella met Jack, who was also Jewish, she began to be more aware of her heritage. Her encounters with anti-Semitism led her, with Jack's encouragement, to question her attitude toward blacks, which had been conventionally southern and paternalistic. Suberman’s recollections of confronting prejudice, her own and others’, gives this consistently thoughtful work an extra intellectual heft. Stella began dating Jack and started college, but when he enlisted with the Air Corps after Pearl Harbor she married him and, like so many young women of that era, followed him to live in a mix of accommodations as they moved to training camps around the country. The author vividly recalls not only the friendships she made, but also the times she lived through: rationing, patriotism, reactions to the war news. After their son Rick was born in 1943, Jack was sent to the Pacific, and Stella went back to Miami to wait with her family for her husband. (Sixty years later, they’re still married.) Suberman’s engaging memoir of those years is, at once, a touching romance, sharp social history, and a subtle diary of intellectual discovery.
A remarkable story that resonates with intelligence and insight.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-403-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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