A remarkable story that resonates with intelligence and insight.
The author of The Jew Store (1998), which vividly described growing up in a small Tennessee town where her relatives were the only Jews, just as memorably recalls her peripatetic life as a war bride.
Suberman begins her story in 1939, the year recent high-school grad Stella met husband-to-be Jack at a Miami Beach park. Stella and her family were now living in Miami; her father had bought a drugstore, and she was adjusting to a larger Jewish presence. Many locals resented that presence; hotels had signs barring Jewish guests, and the country clubs blackballed Jewish applicants. Though her father was not religious, her mother was observant, and after Stella met Jack, who was also Jewish, she began to be more aware of her heritage. Her encounters with anti-Semitism led her, with Jack's encouragement, to question her attitude toward blacks, which had been conventionally southern and paternalistic. Suberman’s recollections of confronting prejudice, her own and others’, gives this consistently thoughtful work an extra intellectual heft. Stella began dating Jack and started college, but when he enlisted with the Air Corps after Pearl Harbor she married him and, like so many young women of that era, followed him to live in a mix of accommodations as they moved to training camps around the country. The author vividly recalls not only the friendships she made, but also the times she lived through: rationing, patriotism, reactions to the war news. After their son Rick was born in 1943, Jack was sent to the Pacific, and Stella went back to Miami to wait with her family for her husband. (Sixty years later, they’re still married.) Suberman’s engaging memoir of those years is, at once, a touching romance, sharp social history, and a subtle diary of intellectual discovery.
A remarkable story that resonates with intelligence and insight.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-403-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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
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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