An uneven coming-of-age memoir of life under two regimes.
Szablya (The Fall of the Red Star, 2002, etc.) presents a memoir about life under Nazi occupation and Communist rule in Hungary.
For the author, air-raid sirens marked the onset of World War II and the end of her childhood. Her grandfather, who founded a chain of drugstores in Budapest and created a popular line of beauty products, had secured a comfortable existence for the family. The clan had two homes, commanded an army of servants and had considerable influence in the community—a life that slipped away when the Nazis occupied Hungary. As the bombing intensified and yellow stars appeared on Jews’ lapels, the family took shelter in the countryside and witnessed the Red Army’s advance, which the author describes as more scourge than salvation. Helen was taught to say that she was 9 to avoid being raped; her pretty mother was kept out of sight for the same reason. Her father, who served as a doctor for wounded soldiers, helped avert the worst encounters. Peace was elusive, and even an armistice didn’t mean the end of the family’s nightmare. The Soviet Union took control of Hungary, the family business was nationalized, and, in time, Helen’s mother was arrested by the secret police. Spanning 14 years, Szablya’s memoir reads like an oral history full of poignant anecdotes: After the siege of Budapest, a man’s house collapsed on him while he ate lunch; a woman whose family was killed could complain only that “the Soviets had taken all of her black slips.” Still, many readers may feel that the book might have benefited from more rigorous editing; the author often gives free rein to childhood memories that seem extraneous, including a trip to Paris packed with exhausting details (“The French sold their bread in long sticks, by the meter”). Some incidents might have had more resonance if the author had provided more psychological insight. That said, the book is a welcome addition to firsthand accounts of the era; historians may find it worthy of perusal, but more casual readers may wish for a more streamlined account.
An uneven coming-of-age memoir of life under two regimes.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479210206
Page Count: 580
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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