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
A superficial, unreliable profile of the PLO's often articulate, photogenic spokesperson during part of the Intifada, and particularly during the Madrid and Washington negotiations with Israel (199193). Victor, a novelist as well as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, maintains near the beginning of her book that Hanan Ashrawi ``was the one person who had made possible [Yasir] Arafat's presence'' on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993, when his famous ``handshake'' with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin took place. Not only does she not make a case for this extraordinary claim, but Victor demonstrates how, throughout most of 1993, the PLO leader kept Ashrawi ``in the dark'' about the secret Oslo negotiations. Her book also is riddled with the kind of errors that make one question her knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, Victor twice claims that the 1917 Balfour Declaration was issued in 1921; the second time, she asserts that it ``provided for two states, Israel and Palestine, to exist side by side.'' Nonsense: The declaration made no reference to any ``state,'' only to Great Britain supporting the establishment of a ``Jewish homeland'' in Palestine, which was soon to be a British mandate. Equally irritating are Victor's stylistic excesses, her use of the kind of hyperbolic prose found in ``puff'' pieces, such as her assertion that Ashrawi's ``razor-sharp responses captured world opinion every time that she faced a camera.'' Earlier this year, Ashrawi resigned from the PLO leadership to establish and head an independent Palestinian human rights monitoring group. It is this, not the media glitz she enjoyed as a PLO spokesperson, that may lend her career its real significance. Until we know whether and how Hanan Ashrawi will contribute to the humanitarian nature of a possible Palestinian state, any biography of her, particularly one as lacking in historical and biographical depth as Victor's, is premature.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-103968-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Not everything you wanted to know, and probably some you didn't (or didn't know you wanted to know, or were afraid to ask because someone might be offended, like ``What was so great about the Inca?''). But for people whose only link with Latino culture is the occasional enchilada, Cuban-born journalist and lecturer Novas lays it all out. From Montezuma to Tito Puente, from santer°a to bacalao, Novas offers a nifty (if glib) blend of history and pop culture (did you know that Desi Arnaz's ``Babaloo'' was a ``song to the Yoruba deity Babalu''?). Perhaps best of all, she offers help with the all-important question facing p.c. gringos (and if you are benighted enough not to know who they are, Novas will tell you that, too): Is it more correct to say ``Hispanic'' or ``Latino''?
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-452-27100-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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