A welcome addition to the World War II memoir shelf.
A gripping memoir from an Eastern European Jew who fought in the French Resistance.
Born in 1921, Rosenberg, who has received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star from the U.S. Army for his service in World War II, thrived within a loving Polish family into his teenage years. His residence in Danzig meant immersion in both Polish and German culture, and his parents believed that Danzig’s well-integrated Jewish population would escape the rise of Hitler and his Nazi supporters. When that optimism began to crumble, the 16-year-old Rosenberg departed Danzig to study in Paris. (Nobody knew then that most of his relatives would be slaughtered in the Holocaust. Rosenberg’s parents and sister survived, but the author would be separated from them until 1952.) The German invasion of France interrupted Rosenberg’s studies. On his own, with dwindling cash, he decided against trying to flee the Nazi juggernaut. Instead, he found a path to joining the underground resistance against the Nazis, centered in occupied France and comprised of fighters from a variety of backgrounds, including expatriate Americans. Rosenberg offered special value as a Resistance guerrilla for multiple reasons: Given his blond hair and other physical features, he did not “look Jewish.” His baby face meant that he could easily pass as a schoolboy. He spoke Polish, German, Yiddish, and English. He could subsist on meager resources during wartime hardships. He welcomed all assignments offered by Resistance commanders, and he was fearless. The narrative unfolds chronologically, in semi-diary format, and while readers will know, of course, that Rosenberg avoided death, the narrative tension is continuous, as the author recalls imprisonments, escapes from confinement, and successful missions against the Nazis. The author’s writing style is crystal-clear and understated, as he wisely allows the drama to unfold from the events themselves. As the war wound down, Rosenberg was unsure about his future. Eventually, he settled in the U.S. and has taught language and literature for 70 years.
A welcome addition to the World War II memoir shelf.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-274219-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
IN THE NEWS
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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