A thoughtful meditation on the painful process of self-knowledge.
Aras’ (The Fugue, 2015, etc.) memoir recounts a tumultuous childhood and an emotional visit to an Austrian concentration camp as an adult.
The author was born in Cicero, Illinois, in 1973, a “rusted manufacturing town” that borders Chicago’s West Side, where, he says, violence was accepted as a part of ordinary life. His parents were Lithuanian refugees who’d fled Soviet occupation in 1945 and were drawn to Cicero because of its Lithuanian community and its Catholic parish. There, Aras suffered terribly under the violent despotism of his father, he says, which would haunt him well into adult life. The author realized that the account of Lithuanian history that his family taught him was a heavily “edited,” anti-Semitic one, and that, by extension, his own identity “seemed concocted, with most adults I knew participating in its composition.” He later moved to Linz, Austria, and took a job as a teaching assistant, and lived there for three years. But he couldn’t make himself visit the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial—a conspicuous reluctance that the author mines with impressive, introspective depth: “I had learned I had the consciousness of the victim and the perpetrator inside me all at once, and my suffering was the result of a war between them….I had avoided concentration camps because…I feared they’d offer one of these shades the opportunity to win out.” Aras’s remembrance is as philosophically moving as it is brief—fewer than 100 pages. Despite its brevity, the memoir’s confessional candor is profoundly affecting as Aras plumbs the depths of his tortured mind with great sensitivity and humility, as when, early on, he notes how the town of Cicero inspired a “conflicted sense of fear, sadness, concern, and bewilderment” in him. The memoir is part of the Little Bound Book Essay Series; it’s small in size—just 4 by 6 inches—and adorned with a few melancholic black-and-white photographs.
A thoughtful meditation on the painful process of self-knowledge.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947003-47-7
Page Count: 94
Publisher: Homebound Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2019
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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