by Vladimir Sychev edited by M.R. Grand ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 2015
An uncommon first-person account of wartime Russia that deserves a clearer translation.
Grand (Always Beside, 2015) compiles his Russian grandfather’s World War II journal.
Vladimir Mikhailovich Sychev was born in Melenki, Russia, in 1923 and raised by his father and stepmother. His diary, written mostly in the present tense, opens in June 1941 with his secondary school leaving party. The teenager’s sense of foreboding (“I feel a strange uneasiness, as if something were coming”) was apt; the very next morning, he reported to the army’s recruiting office. The following day, the bombing of Kiev provoked Josef Stalin’s declaration of war. Sychev became a platoon commander and then a second lieutenant in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. His journal entries range between a paragraph and several pages; most are dated, so it’s easy for readers to track the passage of time until the 22-two-year-old Sychev finally returned home four-and-a-half years later, having survived a hand injury and time as a prisoner of war in Lithuania and Germany. At the German mining camp, he and his comrades escaped through a lavatory, but were caught the next day. At the last minute, they were spared death by firing squad, and this sequence provides the book’s dramatic highlight. The translation uses slang phrases (“Attaboy!”; “he will face the music!”) to good effect, and preserves the loveliness of Sychev’s spare observations, such as “a wonderful pine forest. Strawberries,” and “Snow, cold, endless digging of trenches, sleeping on the move, sleeping in the snow, burnt quilted jackets, charred boots.” On the way home after the war’s end in 1945, Sychev passed a concentration camp in Berlin’s suburbs—a harrowing experience that prompted one of two poems here. Three black-and-white photographs, plus two contemporary color photos of concentration camp crematoria, help to root the book in history. Unfortunately, there are numerous places where typos produce awkward or nonsensical lines, such as “Death mows people!” and “They organized us high diet.” The occasional choice of obscure vocabulary (“spaddle”; “hebetate”) likewise draws unwanted attention.
An uncommon first-person account of wartime Russia that deserves a clearer translation.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5172-0147-0
Page Count: 122
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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