Art critic and novelist Weisgall (Still Point, 1990), whose father and grandfather were distinguished Czech-Jewish composers, writes a sentimental memoir of her upbringing in an emotionally overcharged artistic family. Ideals of music drive the memoir. Weisgall descends from generations of composers of synagogue music. Her father, Hugo, marked a turn toward the secular in the operas he wrote (Six Characters in Search of an Author, among others) but for years led the choir at the Baltimore synagogue where his own father, Adolph (“Abba”), was cantor, and where the family’s liturgical melodies dominated. The memoir opens with a precocious Deborah at Passover service and closes as Deborah, now grown, tours ancestral Prague, the city that symbolizes her parents’ lost world of high culture and art. Music is Abba’s dignity, and Hugo’s solace in his tempestuous marriage. In the shape of the family’s liturgical compositions, it represents as well Deborah’s goal to “claim the songs of her fathers” by singing them as part of a synagogue choir, a hope she realizes—against Judaism’s traditional bias toward male service leaders—in the book’s epilogue. Unfortunately, Weisgall has not achieved enough distance from her earlier self to represent it critically, a condition of autobiography that wins a reader’s sympathy. The tone of the author’s adolescent self-assessment—“I had never thought of myself as anything but perfect”—never quite yields to a more mature voice. This shows up most glaringly in her account of a Yom Kippur service she attended away from home: her histrionic reaction to the Reform liturgy practiced there (“awful and ugly”) wants critique. Instead, Weisgall turns the remembered reaction uncritically toward sentimental affirmation of her family’s own musical traditions. The decision for sentiment cuts off any larger reflection the memoir might have inspired on, say, the relation between Judaism and secular or even Christian art (which her family holds in high esteem). A missed opportunity for critical self-reflection.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-87113-758-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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