by Stephen Koch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 2019
A footnote but one that will appeal to careful readers of modern European history.
A blink-of-the-eye episode in the history of the Third Reich sets the events of Kristallnacht in motion, anticipating the years of terror that followed.
In 1938, a 17-year-old Jewish boy living in Paris, angry at the maltreatment of his family in Germany, bought a gun and, “never before having fired a weapon in his entire life, shot down the first German diplomat he saw.” It is a matter of some irony that the diplomat in question had “denounced Hitler as the antichrist,” writes Koch (The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles, 2005, etc.), but no matter; propelled to instant fame, Herschel Grynszpan provided an excuse for the Nazis to launch sweeping anti-Semitic campaigns in their homeland. When France capitulated, he disappeared into the judicial machine of the Third Reich with the idea that he would be brought up on a show trial to prove that the Jews had really started the war in Europe. Though young and seemingly without much guile, Grynszpan threatened an ingenious defense. Rather than allowing it to air, the Nazis effectively erased him from history—a history in which, by Koch’s account, he was a pawn, though one who may have understood exactly how he was being played and resisted accordingly. Koch is fond of arty flourishes (“While these demonic plans were being laid, this very young man, so recently a child, confronted history—monster history—alone and entirely defenseless”) but careful on matters of causation, noting that something like Kristallnacht would have happened anyway. Throughout, he places seemingly minor events against a much larger backdrop that takes in the murderous intent of the Hitler regime, the devotion of servants such as Joseph Goebbels to Nazism’s “Big Lie” (his service of which, Goebbels believed, would further “the transformation of humanity into a new order”), and the ultimate fate of the Jews of Europe.
A footnote but one that will appeal to careful readers of modern European history.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-144-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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