A troubling meditation on memory, madness, language, evil, and, ultimately, love.
A lyrical, impressionistic memoir by a Holocaust survivor who was only seven when the Nazis first blackened the sun.
Appelfeld, who has often fictionalized those war years (The Iron Tracks, 1998, etc.), here takes on a more difficult task: to remember. “Much has been lost,” he writes, “and much corroded by oblivion.” He does not pretend to remember more than he does and comments that his memories lie in his body more than in his mind. An only child, he lost both parents in the Holocaust, but he escaped from his camp in 1942 (he was ten) and spent two years living in the woods, wandering, suffering at the hands of Ukrainian peasants who took him in, then abused him (some sections are hauntingly reminiscent of Jerzy Kosinki’s The Painted Bird). There are horror stories here, of course, the most disturbing of which was a prison “sport” that took place in the “Pen.” The guards put little children inside the fencing where roamed ravenous German shepherds. Appelfeld also writes powerfully about language. By the time it was over and he was in Israel, he had no language he could call his own. He resented being forced to learn Hebrew and was saddened to lose his German, his mother’s native tongue. From 1946 to 1950, he worked on various agricultural projects, then joined the army, where he was deemed physically unsuitable for combat. Afterwards, he attended Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, where he studied Yiddish and began writing. He discusses the criticism he endured from many who believed the Holocaust should not be fictionalized, but he realized that stories and novels were the only way he could deal with the horror whose specifics he barely remembered. There are unspeakably sad passages about his parents and his grandparents; there are sentences of stark beauty that alarm as well as inform: “In the ghetto, children and madmen were friends.”
A troubling meditation on memory, madness, language, evil, and, ultimately, love.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-8052-4178-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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