A complex and uplifting tale.
A professor’s story of how he found and befriended an estranged member of his extended family, a Jewish woman his grandparents had adopted during World War II.
When van Es (English Literature/Univ. of Oxford; Shakespeare’s Comedies: A Very Short Introduction, 2016, etc.) returned to his native Holland to meet Lien, an elderly Jewish woman, he knew only that she had grown up with his father as an adopted sister. Later—and very mysteriously—she had received a letter from the author’s grandmother severing all connection to the family. Through correspondence and interviews, van Es learned that Lien’s mother sent her daughter to live among Christians willing to protect her from the Nazis. For a year and a half, she lived quietly, missing the parents she never saw again but loving her adopted family. When the van Es home was raided by local Dutch authorities, Lien fled. For more than a year, she moved from hiding place to hiding place, focused solely on surviving. Eventually, she made her way to central Holland, where she spent the next year living with the stern Van Laar family and getting raped by the brother of her adopted father. When she returned to the van Es family in 1945, she had become a brooding teenager. She appeared to grow out of her unhappiness, training first to become a social worker, and then marrying and having children. Yet her “perfect” life did not stop her from later trying to commit suicide. The author’s grandmother saw her behavior as selfish and put what would become a permanent distance between them. Unlike his grandmother, van Es saw that the trauma Lien endured had made her feel cut off from herself and Jewish heritage, like a “cut out” figure in someone else’s culture and life. Compassionate and thoughtfully rendered, the book is both a memorable portrait of a remarkable woman and a testament to the healing power of understanding.
A complex and uplifting tale.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2224-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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