A well-deserved celebration of a courageous and determined public intellectual.
Biography of a prolific Czech-born writer who bore eloquent witness to the Holocaust.
Translator and poet Filkins (Literature and Creative Writing/Bard Coll. at Simon’s Rock; The View We’re Granted, 2012, etc.) offers an authoritative, deeply empathetic life of H.G. Adler (1910-1988), a poet, fiction writer, and scholar who devoted himself to chronicling the atrocities of the Holocaust. Beginning in 1942, Adler was held for 32 months in Theresienstadt, described by Filkins as “a holding space in which to extract wealth, labor, and camouflage for the extermination camps that it fed”; he later was imprisoned in Auschwitz and two other concentration camps. “If I survive, then I will describe it,” he vowed, both as a well-researched work of scholarship and “in poetic manner” as fiction. “To live as a participant and to live as an observer,” he wrote to his wife, who, along with her family and Adler’s parents, perished in the camps. “It’s really like they are two different people.” Adler began to record his experiences even while at Theresienstadt, collecting, as well, whatever documents he could find regarding the camp’s administration. When he realized he was being sent to Auschwitz, he left the papers with Leo Baeck, the most esteemed rabbi in Germany, who arrived at Theresienstadt in 1943 and whose prominence Adler believed might insure his survival. In addition to safeguarding the material, Baeck, who “maintained that Judaism was a religion free of dogma,” helped Adler to think through his connection to religion and identity as a Jew. Filkins describes in harrowing detail the suffering and sadism experienced by camp inmates: grueling slave labor, starvation, disease, whippings, and the ever present specter of death. After the war, Adler worked tirelessly on his writing. By 1948, he completed Theresienstadt 1941-1945, which was followed by several novels. Although he failed to find support from major publishers, by the time he died, more than 20 books had appeared, and he had forged a career as a lecturer on Jewish culture and the Holocaust.
A well-deserved celebration of a courageous and determined public intellectual.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-022238-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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