Anne Frank enthusiasts will wish for more about her, but van Maarsen offers valuable testimony about the particular tensions...
Called “Jopie” in Anne’s published diary, a childhood friend recalls her family’s history as it intersected with the Franks’ before, during and after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
Anne Frank does not appear until page 76, when the author recalls seeing after school one day in 1941 “a short, skinny girl with shiny black hair and rather sharp features.” The two quickly became friends, despite their differences: Jacqueline was reserved and conservative, while Anne was much more aggressive, frisky and curious about boys and sex. Van Maarsen remembers their many hours together playing ping-pong, watching rented movies, sleeping over, playing Monopoly, gossiping about classmates and film stars. One of the strongest moments here is her description of a visit to the Franks’ house immediately after their “departure.” (As the family intended, she believed they had fled to Switzerland and did not learn until after the war that they had been hiding in the secret annex of Otto Frank’s business). Van Maarsen saw Anne’s unmade bed, her new shoes lying on the floor, the entire house uncharacteristically unkempt, the breakfast dishes not yet washed. But Anne’s story consumes a small percentage of the pages here; it’s sandwiched between two long passages about the author’s French Catholic mother and Dutch Jewish father. The van Maarsens escaped deportation and murder only because of the mother’s Aryan status: She pulled strings to cancel the children’s registration as Jews, and her husband was permitted to remove his yellow star upon providing a (false) affidavit that he’d been sterilized. None of them knew the fate of the Franks until Otto returned after the war; it was not long thereafter that he and the author learned of his two daughters’ deaths at Bergen-Belsen.
Anne Frank enthusiasts will wish for more about her, but van Maarsen offers valuable testimony about the particular tensions and horrors her own family endured.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-905147-10-6
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Arcadia Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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