A truly moving and bravely rendered memoir.
An impressionistic memoir of a Polish Jewish girl’s survival hiding as a Gentile in Nazi-occupied Poland.
What lifts this beautifully understated narrative above many other admirable efforts are Frankel’s gift for visceral detail and trained eye as a novelist. Smoothly translated from the Hebrew by Silverston, this memoir by the prolific children’s author and illustrator begins with one traumatic moment—one of many—in her early life. Around the age of 7, Frankel, nee Goldman, was thrust back into the care of her parents, who were hiding in a secret room in Lvov next to a sympathetic Polish carpenter and alcoholic, Juzef Juzak. The Lvov Ghetto had been liquidated in June 1943; the lucky few, like Frankel, had been fobbed off on opportunistic Poles like the cunning Hania Seremet, who took the Goldmans’ money and the mother’s gold teeth to smuggle their only daughter out of the ghetto to Seremet’s parents’ farm in Marcinkowice. Meanwhile, Frankel’s parents, who were well-meaning communists, had earned the respect of Juzak and were harbored in safety, as long as the “girl” did not come, too. The memoir moves with mannerist irony through this shattering time, and the author uses repetitive, obsessive detail to enforce the chilling effect—e.g., about the animals at the farm, the mice and the lice in the hideaway with her parents, and the stories she had to hear but did not want to hear, ending always in the depressing refrain: “That’s what my mother told me, and told me, and told me.” There is almost no other way to tell this powerful story, as the family waited for the Red Army to liberate them from the Nazis and then later had to flee Russian anti-Semitism.
A truly moving and bravely rendered memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-253-02228-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
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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