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
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
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
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