A worthy addition to Holocaust literature, evoking the sweetness of one life lost and reminding us with urgent clarity how...
The journal of a bright young woman who was among the many French Jews funneled through Drancy, the Parisian collection camp, to Nazi death camps.
The book opens on April 7, 1942, when the author was 21. She was reading Shakespeare, Hemingway and Keats. She had a warm circle of friends and family. She wrote of her Sorbonne graduate studies in English literature, of chamber music, picnics and the opposite sex. She received regular postcards from an absent boyfriend (en route to join the Free French), but her new sweetheart was handsome Jean Morawiecki, whom she met at the Sorbonne. Berr wrote of belles-lettres, Beethoven and the bewilderment of young love in that summer of ’42. Then came the decree that all Jews must wear a yellow badge with a six-pointed star. (Her father was arrested for wearing his improperly affixed.) Jews could not attend theaters or restaurants or cross the Champs-Elysées. The edicts brought increasing isolation; Berr worked in a clandestine group that placed Jewish children with families in unoccupied France. Gradually quotidian life succumbed to the inescapable. In her diary, Berr to turned to philosophy and thoughts of mortality, as in the entry that commented, “I am leading a posthumous life.” Such big thoughts combine with small daily concerns in the journal, and it’s the small things that give her account its considerable power. The reader, not the writer, is always aware of the impending end: Berr died at Bergen-Belsen five days before the British liberated the camp. Her diary was passed along several pages at a time and eventually reached its intended reader, Morawiecki, who had escaped to fight the Nazis. “I’ll come back, you know,” she wrote. “Jean, I will come back.” And, in a way, she has; the journal recently became a bestseller in France. Useful additional material is provided by translator Bellos.
A worthy addition to Holocaust literature, evoking the sweetness of one life lost and reminding us with urgent clarity how inexorably it was swept under those tragic times.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60286-064-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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