A detailed examination of a Holocaust victim’s life and a considerate, thought-provoking look into why Holocaust narratives...
Kroll comes from a close-knit Jewish family in postwar London, and in her debut memoir, she traces her ancestors’ migration from Eastern to Western Europe before World War II.
In searching for her family’s lost history, Kroll becomes particularly interested in her great-uncle Benjamin, whose striking portrait captivates her. He’s her beloved grandmother’s brother, though her family is unaware of his fate. After years of searching, she discovers that he died at Auschwitz in 1943, but the fact of his death doesn’t provide closure; on the contrary, it sparks her curiosity. She becomes determined to uncover as much as she can about Benjamin and his family. Her quest takes her to Paris, where Benjamin was living when he was captured by the Nazis; Poland, where she tours Auschwitz; and Israel, where she’s moved to tears at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. Kroll’s prose is eloquent and evocative, and her writing is admirably self-aware. At times, she acknowledges that her family might think she’s obsessed with a ghost, and she wonders if she is, in fact, too rooted in the past. But the goal of her writing is both clear and incredibly important. Benjamin’s life story—his normal prewar life, his family’s separation and his time in a concentration camp—is, like many real-life narratives, a paradox: remarkable and riveting without being terribly original. Yet the point of Kroll’s work isn’t to put forth an untold or unusual story; she tells Benjamin’s tale “to elevate him from a mere number—the number tattooed on his arm in Auschwitz.” In doing so, she realizes that she’s helping, decades later, to “negate the Nazi doctrine of dehumanizing their victims.”
A detailed examination of a Holocaust victim’s life and a considerate, thought-provoking look into why Holocaust narratives are important.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1771800075
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Iguana Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
