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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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