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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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