A forceful meditation touching on loss, memory, Jewishness and the vagaries of chance in human life.
An American Jew undertakes a quest to find out what happened to six of his own relatives who died in the Holocaust.
When he was a boy, some of Mendelsohn’s older relatives would cry when he entered the room. He reminded them of his great-uncle Shmiel, who, along with his wife and four daughters, was a Holocaust victim in Poland. Though Mendelsohn (Humanities/Bard Coll.; The Elusive Embrace, 1999) took on the role of “family historian,” the exact fate of the six remained unknown to him. After his grandfather’s death, Mendelsohn reads a stash of letters from Shmiel that illuminates his great uncle’s desperate efforts to save his family as World War II approached. Mendelsohn then puts extraordinary effort into unearthing their stories. He twice travels to Shmiel’s town, now in Ukraine, and makes trips to countries including Israel, Australia and Sweden to interview relatives and other survivors. The author lets the survivors—many of whom have passed away since the interviews recounted here—unfold their own stories. Many Jews from the town were taken into the woods and machine-gunned; others were gassed. Slowly, a picture emerges of Shmiel and his family—his pride in his butcher business, the girls’ attractiveness—that reclaims them from the past. His search also brings him back to his own religion—he intersperses the story with Biblical passages as a way to grapple with what happened—as well as his own brother, who travels with him. Only at the very end of his hunt, after he thinks he is finished, does Mendelsohn encounter a man who steers him to the actual house where Shmiel and one of his daughters were dragged from a cellar and shot.
A forceful meditation touching on loss, memory, Jewishness and the vagaries of chance in human life.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-054297-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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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