An affecting, well-constructed account of an undercovered aspect of history.
Debut author Nussbaum, with Kirtley (co-author: Alma Rosé, 2000), considers the work of a German lawyer who helped Jewish people escape the Holocaust in this mix of biography and memoir.
Hans Calmeyer may not be a household name like Oskar Schindler, but through his work as a lawyer in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, he was able to save several thousand people from concentration camps. The Nazis ordered all Jewish people to register their grandparents’ religion, and Calmeyer—whose job was to interpret German registration laws in the Netherlands and decide who’d be considered Jewish, half-Jewish, or “Aryan”—used considerable discretion to label as many people Aryan as possible. These fortunate ones included the author and her parents, whose new, “Aryanized” designation allowed them to live out the war in their Amsterdam home—even as their friends and neighbors, including Anne Frank and her family, were forced to go into hiding. With this book, the authors seek to tell the story of the little-known Calmeyer, whose early career included involvement with a student militia during Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch, which transformed his political views. They interweave his story with that of Nussbaum’s family and of her future husband, Rudi Nussbaum, before, during, and especially after the war, when the extent of the Holocaust became clear. A group portrait emerges of ordinary people attempting to survive however they could and of small decisions that reverberated for decades to come. The prose is crisp and full of wonderful, small details: “Since my mother had been part of the Wandervögel (birds of passage) movement as a teenager in Vienna, she was quite progressive with regard to girls and boys going on weekend hikes together in the countryside.” Calmeyer comes across as a very human figure, which makes the significance of his work all the more striking. The inclusion of Nussbaum’s family’s story only highlights the importance of Calmeyer’s actions, as does the fact that so much of the book is set after the war rather than during it. The result is a narrative that eschews hagiography in favor of reportage.
An affecting, well-constructed account of an undercovered aspect of history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-636-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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