A son’s story, a Jewish story, an American story.
Prize-winning journalist Freedman reconstructs his mother’s biography.
Freedman’s mother died of breast cancer more than a quarter of a century ago—indeed, his stepmother has been a part of his life longer than his mother was. And now, in middle age, he decided to learn what he could about Eleanor Hatkin Freedman, her life before marriage and motherhood. The result is terrifically intimate: a son growing up in Jewish New York at mid-century, and a son, decades later, coming into his grief through a process of research. The account of Eleanor’s mother’s efforts to get her relatives out of Nazi Europe is heroic, harrowing, and heartbreaking—though not intimate to the point of myopia. There’s also American history here, as when Freedman explains about Eleanor’s following the model of Rosie the Riveter, or about the pre-rationing runs on stores. And there’s the transfixing undercurrent of soap opera. Freedman’s mother fell in love with a gentile and would have married him had her own mother not reacted histrionically. Instead, she hastily married a good Jewish boy, only to have that marriage annulled not long after the chuppah. Her subsequent courtship with Freedman’s father is summarized in a few paragraphs, and the entirety of Eleanor’s second marriage is skipped—until the chapter about her death. This large omission, surprisingly, works. You get no sense of being cheated of mother-and-wife, since Freedman (Columbia Univ./Jew vs. Jew, 2000, etc.) has so clearly established that his purpose has been to uncover an earlier Eleanor, an earlier era. Nor should anyone skip the concluding note on sources. There, Freedman throws down a gauntlet: he is concerned, he says, by the trend in memoir and family history to blur fact and fiction, to invent what you can’t remember. His reconstruction, he insists, is history, and as factually accurate, and historiographically informed, as possible.
A son’s story, a Jewish story, an American story.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2735-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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