Lacking a stronger, schizophrenic conflict, Jacoby’s memoir tastes rather half-baked.
The memoir of a Catholic-trained atheist whose (ex-Catholic) Episcopalian father turns out to have been Jewish.
This memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jacoby (Wild Justice, 1983) competently traces an inquisitive child's defiant search for her father's hidden background. The identity issue remains on the surface, largely a matter of culture and race—although there are some forays into history, examining the social restrictions of being a Jew in 19th-century America, for example, or the deadlier repercussions of being even a Mischling (a partial Jew) in Europe under the Nazi regime. There are precious few philosophical or theological elements present to give the story much in the way of depth, however, or to position it much higher than the average “should-I-celebrate-Christmas” stocking stuffer. Jacoby's major attraction to her father's buried past, outside of the usual adolescent obsession with questions of identity, appears to be a sincere identification with outsiders and victims. Many African-American friends attend her second marriage, for instance—a non-Catholic church wedding to a man with two atheist Jewish parents. As a talented young journalist, this small-town Midwestern girl meets many Jews and discovers for the first time that Jacoby is a Jewish surname. Jacoby (and her father to some extent) can, by the late 1960s, see their Jewish ancestry as an asset as well as a liability. Her father eventually admits the truth and turns the tables on his daughter by declaring that “identifying oneself as a Jew simply because Jewishness had acquired a certain social and professional cachet was just as opportunistic as denying one's Jewishness to escape social or professional stigmatization.” The gambling addiction of her Jewish ancestors adds some pathos to Jacoby’s memoir, but her identity problems lack the drama of others she mentions: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Catholic novelist Mary Gordon.
Lacking a stronger, schizophrenic conflict, Jacoby’s memoir tastes rather half-baked.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83250-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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
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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