Jessop's transporting backstage recollections of life at sea as a stewardess, including hurried departures from the Titanic and Brittanic. Although Jessop provides details of her sickly youth in Argentina (she found saucers her father squirreled away to poison insects and sampled liberally from them) and her role as surrogate parent to four younger brothers, as well as dutiful companion for her widowed mother, this memoir picks up momentum and color when in 1908 she signs on as a stewardess in the burgeoning passenger-ship trade. Jessop writes with an easy and enviable felicity of insufferable charges (``the haughty, gimlet eyes of a certain well-known society woman''), the unwanted gropings from the male staff, her cramped quarters (``so small that to move suddenly meant disaster to some part of one's anatomy''). Jessop ably conveys the complex passenger/steward relationship, which combined discreet social intimacy with a factotum's talent for handling all exigencies of shipboard life. She is also gently droll: ``The floor was generously covered with little skinned rugs that had the appearance of squashed animals.'' The horror of the foundering Titanic—``one awful moment of empty, misty darkness . . . then an unforgettable, agonizing cry went up from 1500 despairing throats, a long wail and then silence''—comes at the reader full force, as does the sinking of the hospital ship Brittanic, whose propellers chopped to shreds one lifeboat after another. From there it was on to her days aboard world cruisers and what is perhaps her saddest story, of a rickshaw driver's love and loss. Throughout, editor Maxtone-Graham (The Only Way to Cross, not reviewed) provides unobtrusive and enormously helpful annotations on ports, protocols, and additional tidbits of biography. Jessop was poised and graceful as a stewardess. She displays the same qualities as a writer. (35 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1997
ISBN: 1-57409-035-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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