A heartbreaking story of survival and emotional resilience.
A Holocaust survivor’s memoir recounts his attempts to free himself from haunting grief.
Rubin (I Am Small, I Am Big, 1995, etc.) was born into a large Jewish family in Jaworzno, a small and “somber town” in Poland, in 1924. He experienced humiliation and isolation due to the prevailing anti-Semitism of his time and place; due to his dyslexia, school was “torture,” and scholastic success proved elusive. His academic failure, particularly when it came to his Judaic studies, provoked his father’s unrelenting disapproval. The situation in Jaworzno drastically worsened after Hitler came to power, and when, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland, the town was among the first to be occupied. The author was forced to work in a coal mine before he was sent, in 1942, to a concentration camp at the age of 17. He became a self-described “survival machine” and made it through the ordeal, but many members of his family didn’t, and he and his surviving sister, Bronia, were crushed by guilt and despair. “Neither of us knew how to move on. We had nothing to look forward to, just anguish and devastation to run away from. Although we’d survived, living without a home or family in a world full of unfathomable cruelty did not feel at all like a triumph.” Rubin’s achingly poignant recollection is lovingly edited by his co-author daughter, Goodman (Straight From the Earth, 2014, etc.), who supplements his writing with her own research, including interviews with the family. Rubin vividly chronicles his heroic effort “to break free from the psychological prison I’d lived in since I was a child in a little town in Poland” and find some measure of peace, and even joy. His prose is as lucid as it is candidly confessional, and his refusal to simply succumb to self-pity is inspiring. There is, of course, no shortage of Holocaust memoirs, and readers will find that this one covers familiar ground. However, the author travels this territory with grace and intelligence, making his contribution both moving and edifying.
A heartbreaking story of survival and emotional resilience.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-878-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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