Anna Yezierska she’s not, but Gallagher does offer some charming vignettes.
Episodic reflections on a literary life.
Gallagher here tells tales of her Russian-immigrant Jewish family and her own slow beginnings as a writer. Her depiction of her family, at times, seems almost a caricature (when shopping for a party dress, for example, her mother and aunts looked only for models that could be worn with the price tags tucked in—so that it could be returned the morning after the gala). When the author, as a young woman, first expressed her hope of becoming a writer, her parents were predictably dubious (especially as her first bylines appeared in a pulp magazine): What kind of work was that for a nice Jewish girl? They were, however, just as predictably satisfied when she published her first book. The biography she wrote (of an obscure Italian anarchist) had a difficult birth, to put it mildly: an editor at Knopf signed her up and subsequently rejected her manuscript as unpublishable. Later on, a university press picked it up, and it garnered acclaim in the New York Times and other respectable venues. While the inside account of the author’s first book is of moderate interest, some of her portrayals of the creative process are downright bizarre. Gallagher goes on at some length to describe an essay she wanted to write about a family friend who was found murdered in her apartment in a rundown part of town. She sees it as a perfect expression of contemporary social history—an elderly Jew in a neighborhood that is no longer Jewish, a body found in a bathtub, a mysterious dark-skinned man leaving the premises. But it turns out that there was no dark-skinned man—the prime suspect was the dead woman’s money-hungry daughter. How, muses Gallagher, could she write her brilliant article without the Negro?
Anna Yezierska she’s not, but Gallagher does offer some charming vignettes.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50346-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
