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IN OUR HEARTS WE WERE GIANTS

Name: IN OUR HEARTS WE WERE GIANTS
Author: Yehuda Koren
ISBN: 0-7867-1365-8

THE REMARKABLE STORY OF THE LILLIPUT TROUPE--A DWARF FAMILY’S SURVIVAL OF THE HOLOCAUST

by Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004

Horrifying yet mesmerizing: the authors never overplay a potentially melodramatic hand, and no reader will fail to admire...

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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

Categories:

HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FIRST LADY OF FLEET STREET
by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren

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FLESH AND STONE

THE BODY AND THE CITY IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

by Richard Sennett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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An expansive history of Western civilization's evolving conception of the human body and that concept's influence on the erection of cities. Sennett (Sociology/New York Univ.; The Conscience of the Eye, 1991, etc.) argues that the homogenization of contemporary culture is aided and abetted by the failure of modern architecture and urban planning to accommodate the physical and sensory needs of the human body. This is more than mere postmodern sterility to Sennett. He sees this failing as an extension of the ``enduring problem'' of Western civilization: the inability or refusal of those with the power to build cities to honor ``the dignity of the body and diversity of human bodies.'' From Pericles' Athens to Robert Moses's New York, Sennett incorporates discussions of sexuality, religion, politics, medicine, and economics into a historical grand tour of great cities whose buildings, streets, and public squares elevated the status of the ruling elite and diminished that of common citizens. Along the way, we find out how it felt to witness an execution by guillotine in revolutionary Paris, attend a Roman banquet, and observe a trial in ancient Greece, where courtrooms reflected the demands of a participatory democracy—three-foot-high walls and a jury box big enough for the minimum 201 jurors. Though Sennett ably surveys the ideological landscapes of the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, these quotidian revelations are what enliven the book. By exposing the principles of individualism and personal comfort that form the most fundamental assumptions of 20th-century consumer culture, Sennett reminds modern readers that they trade a great deal for comfort—namely their engagement with one another. In so doing, he debunks the myth that the evolution of cities has been one of unfettered progress, or that progress is synonymous with improvement. Passionate, exhaustively researched, and original. (Photos and maps, not seen)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-393-03684-7

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PERFORMER
by Richard Sennett

- BOOK REVIEW
BUILDING AND DWELLING
by Richard Sennett

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CORROSION OF CHARACTER
by Richard Sennett

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IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

ENCOUNTERS IN PERU WITH TERRORISM, DRUG-RUNNING AND MILITARY OPPRESSION

by John Simpson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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A memorable report of a monthlong 1992 expedition to Peru, featuring daring, drugs, and despotism. BBC reporter Simpson (Despatches from the Barricades, 1991) loves a good story, and Peru—source of most of the world's cocaine and home of both the relentless Shining Path guerrilla movement and an army unburdened by procedural niceties—seemed like a natural place to find one. He planned, with a group of colleagues, to cover the drug problem and the political situation for the BBC and other news organizations. But before describing this trip he whets readers' appetites with engaging preliminary tales of a trip from Brazil to visit forest-dwelling Indians and his subsequent negotiations from London over the logistics of the Peruvian trip. Arrived in Lima, Simpson and his team learn that the Peruvian police have captured Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman. Simpson's interviews show the manhunt leader to be one of the government's few committed democrats, while President Alberto Fujimori, who has suspended the constitution, wriggles out of tough questions. Navigating Peru's coca-growing region, an area off-limits to foreigners, Simpson's team, aided by a brave Peruvian journalist and some rickety forms of transport, has several adventures: They take testimony about army human-rights violations, meet a former official willing to testify about army corruption, and escape some menacing local army potentates, whom they manage to film before fleeing. Amid the tension, there is macabre humor, as when a Peruvian journalist composes for Simpson a fawning letter asking to interview a local drug lord (``Our news...has 99 per cent credibility among the people of Europe''). Simpson leaves Peru after getting the country's vice president, Maximo San Roman, on camera calling Fujimori ``the front man'' for a regime linked with drug traffickers. A good yarn with an appealing protagonist that inspires sadness for the Peruvian people and much distaste for their government. (8 pages b&w photos)