Horrifying yet mesmerizing: the authors never overplay a potentially melodramatic hand, and no reader will fail to admire...
The true story of seven dwarves, a family of performers who survived the Holocaust.
The Ovitzes were one of only two families whose members all returned from Auschwitz, and to call that remarkable hardly does justice to their saga, related by Israeli journalists Koren and Negev in a number of different tones. It starts with the musicality of a fairy tale, recounting the life of Shimshon Eizik Ovitz, a dwarf born in 1868 to Jewish parents in Transylvania. Shimshon became a Badchan: “a merrymaker, a colorful, virtually indispensable figure at wedding festivals,” the authors explain, purveyor of “drollery, riddles, and anecdotes.” Of his ten children from two wives, seven were dwarves. Nine of them joined together in a vaudeville act called the Lilliput Troupe, expanding on their father’s repertoire to include love songs and local hits, broad jokes and comic scenes. In 1944 the family was shipped to Auschwitz. The narrative’s tone takes an emotional nosedive as the authors chronicle month by month the Ovitzes’ experiences in the camp, where they were taken under Dr. Josef Mengele’s protective wing (an oxymoronic phrase if ever there was one). Mengele considered the Ovitzes a eugenic gold mine: “Their desirability lay in their number and in their anomaly as an entire family.” They were abused and degraded, but they were also housed in one of the “family camps,” showcases for the Red Cross. They surrendered buckets of blood to Mengele, but each and every one survived, and here the story takes a more upbeat tone. After returning to an unfriendly Hungary, the Ovitzes traveled together, ultimately to Israel, where they resumed their careers and made a success despite the Yiddish character of their act “in a land where Yiddish was frowned upon, where the old culture was scorned and the folk traditions banished.” They were survivors all over again.
Horrifying yet mesmerizing: the authors never overplay a potentially melodramatic hand, and no reader will fail to admire the Ovitzes. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1365-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
In the latest leg of an idiosyncratic intellectual journey, Pellegrino looks at the stories of the Old Testament through the lenses of genetics, paleontology, and archaeology. Pellegrino (Unearthing Atlantis, 1990, etc.) has an autodidact's omnivorous curiosity to match his high-flying imagination. In this new hodgepodge, he expands on the speculations he put forward in his previous expedition into antiquity, in which he hypothesized that the volcano-buried Minoan city of Thera was the inspiration for the legendary Atlantis. Here he conjectures that when an eruption in the second millennium b.c. obliterated the Minoan civilization, its long-distance effects may have been responsible for the plagues of Egypt and the Aegean diaspora that brought the Philistines to Canaan. He also annexes other theories having to do with the contentious ``Mitochondrial Eve'' hypothesis (based on mitochondrial DNA research, it theorizes that genetic the mother of us all lived between 250,000 and 140,000 b.c.) and the Ark of the Covenant's wanderings. Using diverse scientific sources and historical perspectives—Sumerian clay tablets, Egyptian steles, the writings of Herodotus, and, naturally, the Bible—he ``telescopes'' anthropological and archaeological theories to fit Biblical myths like those of Noah and Nimrod, compressing patterns of history into oral tradition's legends. With a natural sense of storytelling, he blends theories of antiquity with the adventures of field work: He is best describing the modern difficulties of conducting digs in Gaza, Jericho, and Iraq (where he radically situates the Biblical Cities of the Plain destroyed by God's wrath). There is, however, a good deal of padding by this accidental archaeologist: reconstructed dialogue, digression, repetition, and flights of fancy that leave solid ground far below. For all its interdisciplinary breadth and originality, this reads like a beery breeze-shooting session with a college prof. (16 pages of b&w drawings, maps, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40006-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Roberti, a former Hong Kong correspondent for AsiaWeek, has followed the convoluted negotiations between China and Britain over the last few years and has produced a formidable narrative of high diplomatic deception and expediency. Britain took Hong Kong from China on a 99-year lease due to expire in 1997. But China has always tolerated this high-powered capitalist outpost not so much because of the technicalities of a lease as for the huge quantities of hard currency she derived from it. Roberti, like many, seems to think that the British had a shot at keeping Hong Kong out of China's clutches. But Britain wanted good relations with the Communist giant and was not prepared to sour them over Hong Kong. He also points the finger of accusation at Hong Kong's own commercial elite, who, he claims, wanted a no- fuss complicity with Beijing at the price of suppressing democracy: ``an unholy alliance of capitalists and communists.'' A colony lawyer named Martin Lee, however, had misgivings, aroused by the treaty signed by Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang in 1984. ``One country, two systems,'' the promise of a democratic Hong Kong allied with mainland China, seemed unlikely. Giving a voice to Hong Kong's ordinary people, Lee organized vociferous protest against the British sell-out. In the process, he became ``more recognizable than the governor and more popular than many pop stars.'' But the pro-democracy movement has made no difference to the eventual outcome. And here there are unpleasant truths that Roberti seems reluctant to face. Were the British really ``forcing'' Hong Kong to live under a dictatorship? The reality, surely, was that the territory's residents no longer had the power to back their wishes up. The notion of a conspiracy, though, always makes for a better read, and Roberti is certainly deft in showing us one. A shame only that he could not come up with a better villain than poor old knock-kneed Britain.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-02621-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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