A thoughtful, unique meditation on exile and homecoming.
A Moscow-born, London-based writer and editor’s memoir about the impact her peripatetic, multilingual background had on her development.
In 2002, Lappin (The Nose, 2001, etc.) received a surprise call from a relative who told her the name and whereabouts of her biological father, a man she had never known. The revelation marked the start of the author’s re-evaluation of a life that had begun in Moscow in 1954 but had taken her to Prague, Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Ottawa, Westchester County, New York, and finally, London. Though Russian by birth, Lappin never had a chance to “grow into my mother tongue.” When she was almost 4, her half-Jewish mother—and the Jewish husband Lappin knew as her father—moved to Czechoslovakia, where Lappin would spend the next 12 years imbibing Czech language and culture while “living under the leaky umbrella of totalitarianism.” While maintaining fluency in Russian and learning French, Lappin watched Czechoslovakia evolve from a Soviet-influenced state into one under full Soviet control. In 1970 her parents moved to West Germany, where Lappin would spend the remainder of her adolescence becoming fluent in German and English but speaking Czech to her brother and Russian to her parents. As liberal as the social and political environments were, the author never felt at home in Germany. She moved again to Israel, where she felt a greater sense of belonging among Jews who “arrive[d] from anywhere and [spoke] any language.” But it was only after a much later move to New York that the “invisible strands” of Lappin’s life came together and she realized that English—a language she chose rather than one that had been foisted upon her—was the best suited to her work as a writer. A meditation on family secrets, loss, and personal belonging, Lappin’s book reveals how, in the absence of rootedness, language can become the “shelter” and home that nurtures selfhood and identity.
A thoughtful, unique meditation on exile and homecoming.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-911-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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