A poignant, memorable story of friendship and of a period in time that should never be forgotten.
Stirring story of the tender and unusual friendship between a Holocaust survivor and a woman 40 years his junior.
Resnick (Creative Nonfiction/Brown Univ., Goodbye Wives and Daughters, 2010, etc.) expertly interweaves both sides of her 15-year friendship with Holocaust survivor Aron Lieb. She intersperses bits and pieces of Aron's life in the camps with her feelings about Judaism, her family life and her steadfast belief that the world should do right by her friend, a man who had suffered more than enough. Told in a nonsensational manner, the narrative provides readers with insights into the daily life of a Jew in the concentration camps: the lack of food and clothing, the brutality and illogical tortures, the endless work and the overwhelming determination to survive. Throughout the book, Resnick refers to Aron as “you,” and the back-and-forth conversations between the two companions continue as swirled snippets of memories of "your" somewhat normal life after the war. "Who will remember once your tattoo is gone?" writes the author. "When you die…that symbol will be buried with you. The numbers will decompose. You will come unmarked…then the forgetting will truly commence." Nightmares and anxiety attacks prevailed as Aron grew older, and he continued to struggle with the heart-rending grief of losing most of his family in the camps. Resnick and her family became the family Aron lost, and the author was single-minded in her efforts to provide a respectful death for her friend. Resnick’s compassionate prose captures the voice and soul of Aron, ensuring that his memories will continue long after the number "141324" has disappeared.
A poignant, memorable story of friendship and of a period in time that should never be forgotten.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-8038-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skirt! Books/Globe Pequot
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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