This significant Holocaust memoir of a girl hiding in Holland will be compared to Anne Frank’s diary, though it is very different. Yes, Edith went into hiding in the same city and same month as Anne Frank, and her mother even met Miep Gies, who hid the Franks. But while the Frank diary took decades to get recognized, this book (largely in diary format) was condensed by Reader’s Digest, won a literary award in England, and will be published in four other languages. Anne was also a precocious preteen, but more famous for diary entries on her family’s psychology and philosophical musings. Edith isn’t analytical, but her description is superior. In the 1940 invasion of neutral and safe Holland, for example, anti-aircraft fire is “heavy dark smoke clouds and little gray puffs, like bubbles,” and German paratroopers arrive in “hundreds of little black balloons.” Because she was, at 14, an ordinary teenager, she talks about boys, skating, school, and clothes. A very secular person with a Jewish grandmother, Edith sees herself as Jewish when Nazi laws forbid her from attending school or riding her bike. She wears the “ugly” yellow star of David as a “badge of honor” that prompts the sympathetic Dutch to say, “Keep your chin up.” As the situation deteriorates, her ailing mother and grandmother are caught by the Germans, one older brother escapes to America, and her non-Jewish father wastes away. Once the coddled baby, Edith has to spend her late teens posing as a gentile with the zur Kleinmiedes family—who already had to board Nazi officers. She can only shout her real name to the wind, thinking about deprivations like their one-egg-a-month ration and waiting for liberation. In another major difference from Anne Frank, Edith survives to double her diary’s content with adult comments. A valuable opportunity to see the situation just outside Anne’s attic.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56947-178-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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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