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NINE SUITCASES

Name: NINE SUITCASES
Author: Béla Zsolt
ISBN: 0-8052-4204-X

A MEMOIR

by Béla Zsolt & translated by Ladislaus Löb ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 9, 2004

Vignettes of hell: a valuable account of daily life under Hungarian fascism—banned for four decades even under Communist...

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An affecting memoir of the Holocaust by a noted Hungarian author, with many an unusual twist.

Born in 1895, Zsolt had published ten novels and four plays by the time a right-wing government came to power in Hungary, the product of “folksy populists . . . who decried urban Western civilization and championed a chauvinistic system based on the alleged strength and purity of an unspoiled Magyar race rooted in the Hungarian countryside.” Regrettably, Zsolt was an urban Jew, and though he had served the emperor with distinction in WWI, he found himself a target. Because it was, at least superficially, a full partner with Nazi Germany, Hungary got to set its own rules, which did not include exterminating its Jews—at least at first. Zsolt was thus sent to the countryside, and then into Ukraine, as a laborer. “I was thoroughly trained in gravedigging out there,” he writes, waiting with his fellow prisoners to clean up after Hungarian soldiers, White Ukrainian commandos, and Nazi troops as they burned villages and gunned down the fleeing inhabitants, who “tumble all over the ground, into the glowing ashes.” Zsolt writes of the daily torments of the region’s Jews, who sensed that something worse was on the way but for the time being had to withstand the greedy scheming of neighbors outside the shtetls and ghettos and, as the author recounts it, the excesses of Nazi martinets and fascist petty officials; as one SS officer berates a young rabbi, in one memorable scene, a Hungarian police captain watches “with the expression of a pedantic official, who is not responsible for the matter in hand, but who doesn’t disapprove of what’s going on.” But the victim refuses to relent, and, as Zsolt writes, “It made no difference, but the rabbi won,” which sends the Nazi officer into a foul humor: “He felt as uncomfortable about looking his audience in the eye as an actor who feels everything has gone wrong that day.”

Vignettes of hell: a valuable account of daily life under Hungarian fascism—banned for four decades even under Communist rule.

Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004

ISBN: 0-8052-4204-X

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Schocken

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004

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NIGHT

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...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

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THE TALE OF A NIGGUN
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

- BOOK REVIEW
NIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)