A tender memoir about caring for her aging parents from an author better known for fiery feminism (Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, 1972, etc.). Shulman’s most recent book, Drinking the Rain (1995), reflected on the rewards of retreat to an island in Maine. This narrative takes her back to Cleveland, where she left her family more than 40 years ago to begin a fight for independence that would take her through three husbands and two children of her own. But as Shulman makes clear, her flight was not away from an unhappy childhood——I had always felt cherished by my parents,” she says—but from ties so strong that she had to physically remove herself in order to separate from them. Her brother’s death and her mother’s subsequent deterioration brought the author home, where she found satisfaction in daughterly duties. Her parents finally ensconced in a senior residence, Shulman began to probe the past, aware that her father had been impotent, her mother had taken lovers, her brother had resented her (she never does get a handle on that uncertain relationship). But her lawyer father had also earned a place in a historical-society archive for his labor arbitration decisions; her mother had made herself into “an eight-course banquet” of family, music, and travel and was an early collector of artists like Stella, de Kooning, Nevelson, and more. The author alternates dips into her childhood with stories of time spent with her parents in the nursing home, where she redeems whatever pain may have gone before by accepting and understanding who they have become: incontinent, sometimes incoherent, often unpredictable, but still the remarkable individuals who shaped her. Loving and accurate description of the author’s rollover from dependent child to caretaker child, and of the parents who continued to fashion themselves in old age as they had throughout their lives. (b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 2, 1999
ISBN: 0-8052-4161-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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 engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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