A dark, compelling narrative of secrecy and betrayal.
An American journalist trolls the archives of the Hungarian secret police (AVO) to piece together her parents’ imprisonment in and flight from Hungary in the mid-1950s.
Marton (The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, 2006, etc.), who arrived with her family in America in 1957 and grew up in Maryland, discovered only after her parents had died how little she understood about what they had endured. Cultured, educated Jews who had been persecuted by the pro-Nazi Hungarian fascists during World War II, Endre and Ilona Marton, based in Budapest, worked as stringers for the American newswire services and for ten years after the war befriended Americans and others from all over the world. The Martons had become essentially the Hungarian news contact for the rest of the world, and in his reporting Endre used candor and irony to expose the Hungarian autocracy. In fact, AVO officials were keeping close tabs on the couple, aided by informers close to the family, gathering evidence that the Martons were passing secrets to the Americans. In 1955, Endre was thrown into Fo Utca prison, and his wife followed four months later; they were tried and eventually released. During the year or so of their absence, Marton and her sister, uncomprehending, were housed in a foster home. The author’s probing work effectively renders an enormously unsettled, painful time of shifting allegiances and political treachery. She even learned that her parents were suspected of espionage by the CIA and were dogged by Hungarian “watchers” in America intent on luring them back to aid the Cold War cause in Hungary.
A dark, compelling narrative of secrecy and betrayal.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8612-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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