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THE CROOKED MIRROR

Name: THE CROOKED MIRROR
Author: Louise Steinman
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5055-2

A MEMOIR OF POLISH-JEWISH RECONCILIATION

by Louise Steinman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2013

Steinman’s elegiac book is a powerful reminder of how ideologies can become “crooked mirror[s]” that distort reality and...

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A writer/literary curator explores the anguished, often contentious topic of Polish Jewry through the lens of her own family history.

For centuries, Jews “had been part of Poland’s body and soul,” writes Steinman (Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities/Univ. of Southern California; The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War, 2001). But during the Holocaust, their Christian neighbors did the unthinkable and allowed millions of Jewish people to die in Nazi death camps. The maternal side of the author’s family was so marked by this horror that family history disappeared into a “black hole” of silence. Aching from this loss of connection to her past, Steinman traveled to a Polish interfaith retreat looking for answers. She left realizing how little she knew, not just about her family and personal prejudices, but also about Polish history. For the next decade, she returned to Poland to recuperate lost family history and understand the relationship between Jews and Christians. As the author pieced together the fragments of her family’s past, she came into contact with Poles of all ages and faiths who had dedicated their lives to not only studying Polish Jewish history, but opening a dialogue about both the Holocaust and Polish anti-Semitism. Steinman discovered how cities throughout Poland and Eastern Europe had once been home to thriving multiethnic communities. When war expunged the Jews and their culture from those populations, the cities became flattened shells of what they had once been. The rise of Nazism was to blame for this mass genocide, but as Steinman learned, Israel also helped to perpetuate anti-Polish sentiment by highlighting only what happened during Hitler’s reign of terror and ignoring everything else.

Steinman’s elegiac book is a powerful reminder of how ideologies can become “crooked mirror[s]” that distort reality and destroy lives, cultures and nations.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-8070-5055-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.