A flawed memoir, but an amazing story of wartime survival.
Los Angeles County Board of Education president Gilbert-Lurie teams with her mother in this occasionally unwieldy yet affecting memoir depicting how the deep psychological wounds from the Holocaust span three generations.
The first and most vivid section is told in the voice of Rita Lurie, née Ruchel Gamss, born in Urzejowice, Poland, to a family of Jews caught in the terrors of the Nazi invasion during World War II. By 1942 the Germans had occupied their remote town, and five-year-old Rita and her family were required to report to the train station for deportation. They split into groups to elude capture and persuaded a neighboring Polish farmer to harbor the group in their attic. Everyone believed the refuge was temporary, though they managed to hide out for two years—but not without casualties. Rita’s toddler brother died, possibly from suffocation to keep him from crying, and Rita’s mother died shortly thereafter. After liberation, they spent five years in displaced-persons camps, during which Rita’s father remarried an Auschwitz survivor. The remaining Gamss family immigrated to America in 1949. Rita suffered from physical weakness and mental anguish for years, and her subsequent account records her painful attempts to come to terms with debilitating feelings of abandonment and anger at her controlling stepmother. In the second section of the book, her eldest daughter recalls growing up with her anxious mother and her own fears and the drive to succeed. Gilbert-Lurie’s narrative is unavoidably less dramatic, except when she and her cousins returned to Poland in 1987 with a film crew to seek out the still-living Polish farmwife who hid the Jews. The third section, which introduces the author’s daughter into the narrative, is more tedious, but the essential story remains riveting.
A flawed memoir, but an amazing story of wartime survival.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-173476-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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
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
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