A personal recollection and tribute that’s loaded with engaging historical tidbits.
A family memoir that focuses on the life of an intrepid young woman who left her family in Montenegro to become a dedicated Alaskan.
Radovic (Getting to Know the Manager, 2014) first met Vuka Stepovich, his great-aunt, when he visited her in Saratoga, California, in 1973, when he was 25 and she was 70. The author, born in Belgrade, Serbia, grew up listening to family tales about Vuka, who, in 1928, defied tradition and eloped with a much older man, Marko. He’d left his homeland decades earlier for California and eventually scored his own fortune in Alaska. After divorcing his first wife, he returned to the “Old Place” of Bay of Kotor, Montenegro, to find someone with whom to share his life. The timing was perfect, as Vuka had spent 10 years caring for her father and younger siblings after her mother’s death, and she was ready for escape and adventure. So began a love story that took her from the sunny Adriatic coast to the frigid, harsh Alaskan territory, which she embraced with enthusiasm. In 1942, she, Marko, and their four children moved to California, where Marko had begun his American dream, but they never gave up their Alaskan homestead. Even after Marko’s death in 1944, Vuka maintained their northern holdings, and by the ’70s, she was spending her summers up north. Although Radovic’s life work has been in international finance, he’s apparently inherited his family’s love of history. As a result, his slim memoir of his own family serves almost as well as a Slavic chronicle of times dating back to the Ottoman Empire and through two world wars. Overall, it is conversational in tone, with an occasional, pleasant quirkiness of phrasing as he traces the lineages, migrations, cultures, and religions of those who’ve populated the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea.
A personal recollection and tribute that’s loaded with engaging historical tidbits.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-7965-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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