by Zev Birger ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1999
Noteworthy but unremarkable as Holocaust memoirs go. Birger served in the Israeli government in important commercial posts, including directing the Jerusalem International Book Fair and the Economic Council on Printing and Publishing. This book industry background, like the foreword by ex—prime minister Shimon Peres, only establishes Birger’s love of books, not his credentials to write one. Normally, description of the unreal Holocaust setting can compensate for literary shortcomings, but the language here is too often stilted: “a very small number of mothers had managed to save their offspring.” Instead of a dramatic night watch for Liberation, Birger only notes that “for a while, we had been able to observe that something was wrong with the Germans.— A post-liberation highlight was meeting General Patton and explaining why he preferred fighting for Jewish Palestine to resettlement in the United States. From his youth in Lithuania fighting anti-Semites to his underground activities in the Kovno ghetto and the hellish stay in the Dachau extermination camp, it was Zionist dreams and Hebrew culture that kept Birger alive. The only survivor in his family, he constantly convinced himself that circumstances were bearable and that he must live through the hunger, disease, and back-breaking labor to exact the revenge of survival. On his slow emergence toward health, marriage, and normalcy, he decided that, while Germans denying knowledge and complicity with Hitler were liars, there were good and bad people of every nationality, so any racism would make him guilty of Nazism. Like the rest of the world, Birger remained silent about the Holocaust for decades (“I did not want to seem melodramatic”) until his son wrote from the tank corps during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, “do not worry, we will win—there is no going back to Dachau.” A writer so established in the publishing world still would have benefited from better editing and translation.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55704-386-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Newmarket Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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 Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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