Images and emotions indistinct and unresolved, presented as if glimpsed from a seat in a passing train. Even when they burn,...
Free-floating memories of a Viennese Jewish childhood and flight from the Anschluss, roughly stitched together in a strappingly formal voice and counterpointed by Abish’s later visit to Austria.
Readers are brought directly into the custard of novelist Abish’s (Eclipse Fever, 1993, etc.) fraught youth and pummeled with runaway questions: “What, then, did I find so disquieting? Was it the logic that dictated their shared agenda? The practical motives?” Disquiet for sure, as Abish rolls in ambiguity, indeterminacy, and equivocation like a dog in something long dead. “Was this, I wonder, my very first awareness of self-deception?” he asks when considering his family’s poor excuse for a Christmas tree in his youth. Upon returning to his childhood home years later, he “experienced a satisfaction at feeling so indifferent. It was just another house!” Surely his flight from the Nazis was a scary event, but Abish chronicles it as a series of glancing encounters: the night his family was told to leave their home in one hour’s time; his game of catch with the ghetto’s administrator, “a maniacal individual whose actions frequently bordered on unbridled lunacy.” This approach can be frustratingly elliptical, but there are some remarkably sharp isolated tableaux. Forget the evocations, look at the shadows being thrown: surviving inmates from death camps, “marched by maniacal guards . . . across the devastated landscape of Poland,” or the author’s grim realization that as an Austrian Jew he is the enemy in Israel. Anselm Kiefer provides a loophole into an episode of self-recognition for Abish, as does a tightly knit synagogue community, a mnemonic center of gravity “swaying in prayer, their voices pitched high, filling the air with such acute urgency, such passion that for once I, by heart a skeptic, a doubter, felt my resistance fade.”
Images and emotions indistinct and unresolved, presented as if glimpsed from a seat in a passing train. Even when they burn, Abish provides a protective distance.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-41868-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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