Affecting records of a world at once familiar and distant—a welcome addition to the literature of the Shoah.
A moving work of literary archaeology, rescuing Jewish texts from the oblivion of history.
“Es iz shver tsu zeyn a yid.” It’s hard to be a Jew. History has proven that countless times, with particular fury in the place New Yorkercontributing cartoonist Krimstein calls Yiddishuania. There, in 1939, a linguistic and cultural institute mounted “an ethnographic study in the guise of a meagerly funded autobiography contest.” By cruel irony, the winners were to be announced on Sept. 1, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland. The Gestapo seized many of the documents, but librarians spirited some away—and then hid them again when Stalin launched a Soviet pogrom after the war. The first essay, by an unidentified 17-year-old girl, is a record of repression: She was discouraged from reading religious and secular texts thought inappropriate for women and was forbidden from saying kaddish after her father died. Another essay recounts the efforts of a 20-year-old man who spent his time and money writing letters to Franklin Roosevelt pleading for asylum, a request that the State Department declined. Another young man questions traditional religion, not least because he was in love with a young woman who did not return the affection. “Was it because I didn’t become a Communist and start eating pork?” he wonders. “Was it because I couldn’t go to the dinner dance her socialist youth group had on Yom Kippur?” The ordinary travails of adolescence and young adulthood become more sharply pronounced against the background of descending terror. In this excellent follow-up to The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, Krimstein, whose illustrations recall both Chagall and Art Spiegelman, closes by affirming these pieces as “voices, garments, smiles, years, laughter”—in short, living documents in the face of death.
Affecting records of a world at once familiar and distant—a welcome addition to the literature of the Shoah.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-370-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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
A rousing, suspenseful adventure tale.
A harrowing expedition to Antarctica, recounted by Departures senior features editor Sancton, who has reported from every continent on the planet.
On Aug. 16, 1897, the steam whaler Belgica set off from Belgium with young Adrien de Gerlache as commandant. Thus begins Sancton’s riveting history of exploration, ingenuity, and survival. The commandant’s inexperienced, often unruly crew, half non-Belgian, included scientists, a rookie engineer, and first mate Roald Amundsen, who would later become a celebrated polar explorer. After loading a half ton of explosive tonite, the ship set sail with 23 crew members and two cats. In Rio de Janeiro, they were joined by Dr. Frederick Cook, a young, shameless huckster who had accompanied Robert Peary as a surgeon and ethnologist on an expedition to northern Greenland. In Punta Arenas, four seamen were removed for insubordination, and rats snuck onboard. In Tierra del Fuego, the ship ran aground for a while. Sancton evokes a calm anxiety as he chronicles the ship’s journey south. On Jan. 19, 1898, near the South Shetland Islands, the crew spotted the first icebergs. Rough waves swept someone overboard. Days later, they saw Antarctica in the distance. Glory was “finally within reach.” The author describes the discovery and naming of new lands and the work of the scientists gathering specimens. The ship continued through a perilous, ice-littered sea, as the commandant was anxious to reach a record-setting latitude. On March 6, the Belgica became icebound. The crew did everything they could to prepare for a dark, below-freezing winter, but they were wracked with despair, suffering headaches, insomnia, dizziness, and later, madness—all vividly capture by Sancton. The sun returned on July 22, and by March 1899, they were able to escape the ice. With a cast of intriguing characters and drama galore, this history reads like fiction and will thrill fans of Endurance and In the Kingdom of Ice.
A rousing, suspenseful adventure tale.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984824-33-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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