Mazzeo chronicles a ray of hope in desperate times in this compelling biography of a brave woman who refused to give up.
The remarkable history of the “female Schindler.”
The story of Irena Sendler (1910-2008), who saved more than 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis, was buried for decades by the communist administration of Poland. It finally came to light in the 1990s, and Mazzeo (The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, 2014, etc.) has combed archives and interviewed the few survivors to tell the tale. Like so many who tried to save Jews from the Nazis, Irena would only say she could have done more. When she was 7, her father, a doctor, died working in the typhoid epidemic of 1916-1917, and her mother struggled to educate her. At the University of Warsaw, she rekindled her friendship with Adam Celnikier. He was a radical Jewish lawyer and the love of her life even though both were married. She supported and protected him in hiding throughout the war. In the community internship program at the Polish Free University, Irena met Dr. Helena Radlinska, the driving force behind the resistance of Warsaw. When the Nazis invaded in 1939, resistance quickly built up, led by older men, the Jewish community, and women. That resistance is a large part of the reason Poland was subject to such brutal repression. As a social worker, Irena and her colleagues were able to manipulate paperwork to create new identities. They were also granted passes to enter and leave the Warsaw ghetto, allowing them to smuggle in medicine and false papers and eventually help set up their network to free the children. Sometimes on their own or led by local teens, the children escaped through the filth of the sewers. Irena and her small band found safe houses and orphanages where the children could ride out the war. Her careful records were written on cigarette papers so children could be reunited with surviving family after the war.
Mazzeo chronicles a ray of hope in desperate times in this compelling biography of a brave woman who refused to give up.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7850-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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