A moving and memorable portrayal of a less familiar aspect of the Jewish plight during WWII.
Riveting account of a family who fled the Nazis only to endure further persecution in Shanghai.
Characterizing her work—winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award—as “a memoir in the creative non-fiction genre,” the author, who was born in Shanghai and now lives in Canada, tells the story in the voice of her mother, Nini Karpel, the youngest daughter of a prosperous and patriotic Viennese department-store owner. Her father died suddenly in 1922 when Nini was six, leaving her mother responsible for the business as well as their four children. Life went on more or less as usual, but the political situation was of increasing concern. In 1936, Nini fell in love with Poldi Kosiner, the son of Polish refugees, but he could find work only in Italy, and they had to continue their romance by correspondence. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, the Karpels were immediately affected by the new anti-Jewish laws; their business and assets were seized, relatives were beaten, and they feared for their lives. Learning that refugees were welcome in Shanghai, Nini, acting on her own, approached a gentile lawyer, who bought their tickets for the long voyage to China. Her courageous initiative helped save her mother and siblings; with travel arrangements in place, the Karpels were able to obtain exit visas. Once in Shanghai, a place quite unlike any they had ever known, they were joined by Poldi, who came overland. Richly evoking the city’s sights and smells, Nini’s narrative details their struggle to find work; the arrival of the Japanese, who made Jews live in Shanghai’s rundown Hongkew section; the brief interlude of peace and prosperity when the war finally ended; and then the Communist takeover that made it impossible for the family to remain in China. Kaplan closes with their 1949 arrival in Toronto.
A moving and memorable portrayal of a less familiar aspect of the Jewish plight during WWII.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33054-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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