Well-wrought, honest and even more ambiguous than most family histories.
Regret is the theme of this candid, complicated memoir, which chronicles New York Daily News reporter Einhorn’s visit to the Polish family that sheltered her Jewish mother during World War II.
The author went to the town of Bedzin in 2001 to investigate her mother Irena’s story of being hidden by gentiles after her parents were rounded up by the Nazis and put on a train headed for an unknown destination. As the legend went, Irena’s father, Beresh, tried to persuade his wife to jump from the train with him, but she refused. He jumped anyway and headed back to Bedzin, where he collected his baby daughter from the elderly aunt caring for her and handed over Irena to a Polish woman he knew named Honorata Skowronska. Pleading with her to keep the child safe until he could return, Beresh gave Honorata “his money, his jewelry, the deed to his factory and apartment” before being arrested and deported once again. After the war, he returned from Auschwitz, retrieved his child and emigrated to Detroit. Whether or not he ever promised Honorata that her family could have his home in Bedzin is a murky question that drives much of the memoir. Irena never dwelled on memories of Poland, but the author hoped that her trip there would help repair a fraught relationship with her difficult, demanding mother. However, shortly after Einhorn first contacted Honorata’s son Wieslaw, who remembered Irena as his “sister,” her mother died of cancer, underscoring yet again the loss of connection with the past. Running parallel with her family saga is the author’s attempt to dispel the instinctual, stereotypical antagonism she felt for the Polish generation that betrayed the Jews, while marveling at the resurgence of interest in Jewish culture she found in young Poles she met. Einhorn delicately and movingly interweaves the personal and the epic.
Well-wrought, honest and even more ambiguous than most family histories.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5830-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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