Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, with which it is likely to be compared (and hold up well in the bargain), Eisenstein’s memoir is...
String Hebrew-language chicken tags together, and you’ll discover that the word “kosher” spells “Jew” sideways. So this brilliantly conceived child’s-eye view of the Shoah generation reveals—to name just one mystery unraveled.
The faux-naïve drawing that accompanies the revelation in Torontonian artist/editor/writer Eisenstein’s debut book, incidentally, proves that point, just as the other drawings in this richly illustrated graphic book open windows on a world once very much in danger of disappearing. The adult Eisenstein, who turns up from time to time to remark on her younger self, has the language and self-awareness to consider herself something of a “Jewish Sisyphus, pushing history and memory uphill, wondering what I’m supposed to be.” Her younger self wonders about other things: her mother’s worries and fears, her father’s anger. At eight years old, she is introduced to The Diary of Anne Frank and falls under the spell of the swastika, asking her sister how to draw one, as if daring to conjure up the devil; when the devil does not appear, she and her sister agree on one thing: to keep the whole thing a secret from their parents. Her father has secrets, too, even a semi-secret life centered on poker, for here, he is a Hall of Fame master of the art of korten shpiling. Her mother has memories carefully kept hidden, which she unveils in a surprising tape-recorded interview for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. “You’d think if you put people together in such terrible conditions, they would eat each other up,” she recalls. “No—we fed ourselves with white lies of hope.” Page after page, anecdote after sketch, Eisenstein teases out an affecting portrait.
Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, with which it is likely to be compared (and hold up well in the bargain), Eisenstein’s memoir is an ultimately hopeful act, enshrining ordinary people so that they will not be forgotten, wrinkles and warts and secrets and all.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2006
ISBN: 1-59448-918-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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