A Jewish teenager views World War II from a very precarious perch—Nazi-occupied Latvia—in this quietly harrowing memoir.
Anders, a prominent chemist, was 15-years-old when the German army rolled into his hometown of Liepaja, Latvia, in 1941. Faced with the Germans’ murderous anti-Semitic policies, his middle-class Jewish parents hit upon a desperate survival strategy—his mother, Erica, would claim to be a German foundling raised by a Jewish family. The ploy didn’t save his father, who was dragged from their apartment and shot in a mass execution, but it gave Erica the provisional status of an Aryan and her two sons that of half-Jews—a gray area in the Nazi racial taxonomy that sheltered them from the worst persecution. The scheme became a cat-and-mouse game with skeptical Nazi officials; the family gleaned one temporary reprieve after another as they amassed bogus documentation of German ancestry—the author used his knowledge of chemistry to alter identity papers—always aware that one false step could lead to a rejection of their claim and consignment to a death camp. It’s a nerve-wracking saga in which life and death depend on a capricious fate, and the author tells it with an absorbing lucidity. Writing with an almost scientific detachment, he sketches vivid portraits of the people around him—Erica, whose manipulative charm saved herself and her children, is especially vibrant—and shrewdly analyzes their actions under duress. He also presents an even-handed assessment of Latvia’s collective responsibility for war crimes under German occupation—he testified at the Nuremburg Trials in 1948—and concludes that, while some collaborated in atrocities, most Latvians deplored them and many gave crucial help to Jewish neighbors, including his family. Anders’ subdued, matter-of-fact account bears witness to terror and sorrow without histrionics, and to a simple moral vision—“I met enough decent, brave, and noble Germans and Latvians during the war to be immunized against prejudice”—that resonates. A testament of remarkable clarity and humanity, wrung from dark experience.
Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-9984993188
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Occupation Museum Association of Latvia
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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