A cleareyed, moving memoir that increases understanding of a lesser-known Holocaust escape route and its trials.
As World War II breaks out in Poland, a Jewish family travels east in this memoir of survival.
Holocaust memoirs are a crowded field, but few tell the story of escape via Siberia and Tajikistan. Lipiner, in her debut work, describes how her father’s foresight, planning and resourcefulness saved the lives of 15 people. In the summer of 1939, Lipiner was 6 years old and enjoyed playing with her older sister Frydzia and cousins in quaint little Sucha Beskidzka, Poland. When the war broke out, her father, who was aware of the Nazis’ hatred of Jews, was ready: “Because he had sensed that the war was imminent, he had been planning our escape even before the war started.” He persuaded three generations—his own family and those of his two sisters, 15 people in all—to head toward Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, where Soviets eventually transported Jews to a labor camp in Siberia. When allowed to leave, the clan—led by Lipiner’s father—once again packed up, arriving at last in Leninabad, Tajikistan. To survive, they depended on the small Jewish community’s generosity. Hunger, cold and infectious disease besieged them, but the family survived. Through many difficulties, separations and turns of fortune in the chaos of postwar Europe, the family found a final refuge in America. Lipiner writes well from a child’s perspective: Cold and hungry in Siberia, she and her sister found magic in the frost flowers on the windows. While noting much great generosity, she also acknowledges the peevishness and despair that hardship can bring. Her father’s “intelligence, common sense, and gumption,” illustrated with many examples, is set compassionately against her mother’s crushed spirit. With such an emotional story to tell, it would have been easy to slide into pathos, but the author controls her tone well. A small anecdote about her father’s characteristic resourcefulness in putting together scrip to buy his worried daughter a chocolate bar depicts perfectly how he expressed love in deeds, not words: a beautiful miniature of what the entire book portrays.
A cleareyed, moving memoir that increases understanding of a lesser-known Holocaust escape route and its trials.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475934953
Page Count: 210
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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