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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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