A deeply felt story and a sobering reminder of the long shadows of the Holocaust.
A searing survivor’s tale told by a son.
This English language debut by Swedish writer and TV personality Rosenberg is both a personal journey and a son’s letter to a loving father, David, who survived Nazi Germany but never got over it. Drawing on both historical research and family documents, the author re-creates the life of a Polish Jew who saw his hometown turned into a barbed wire hell in which 200,000 people, including his father and brother, lost their lives. Throughout the book, Rosenberg tries to picture what David saw and heard: Was he there when Jewish leader Chaim Rumkowski told the gathered throng that he had reached a bargain with the Nazis and only sick people and small children would be liquidated? David was sent to Auschwitz, which he survived only to spend the last desperate days of the war at the Wöbbelin concentration camp, where Nazis tried killing off as many Jews as possible before the liberators arrived. After the war, the ambitious David and his wife settled in the Swedish factory town of Södertälje, outside of Stockholm, for what they hoped would only be a “brief stop” on the road to a bigger, brighter future. Instead, it was a dead end. David’s dreams were at constant war with his recurring nightmares. “What I realize, much later,” writes the author, “is that time after time you make a run-up toward the horizon, and time after time you fall back to earth again.” Rosenberg was constantly asking his father why: Why this direction and not that one? Why didn’t you follow through on your dreams? It isn’t until the devastating ending that we see just why these questions loomed so large in his head.
A deeply felt story and a sobering reminder of the long shadows of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59051-607-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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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