Literate, lucent, and well researched: a fascinating glimpse into how artists respond as the world explodes around them. (44...
Did Anton Chekhov’s niece, a major Nazi film star, spy for Mother Russia during WWII? Yes and no, concludes the author of several previous works about Soviet-German conflict.
Beevor (The Fall of Berlin, 2002, etc.) begins with a startling moment in 1945. The Germans have surrendered, the war in Europe is over, and the Moscow Art Theatre is presenting The Cherry Orchard, featuring the playwright’s aging widow in her signature role of Ranyevskaya. Taking her bows, the actress sees her niece, Nazi film queen Olga Chekhova (1897–1980), waving at her from the audience. What is she doing there? Beevor then rehearses some family history and introduces us to his other characters. Prominent among them are the playwright’s nephew, Misha Chekhov, a gifted actor briefly married to Olga, and her brother, Lev Knipper, before the war a promising composer and during the war a crafty agent and trainer of Soviet alpine forces. In 1921, the divorced Olga fled the murderous Russian civil war for Berlin, her advent coinciding nicely with the rise of German cinema. Her career skyrocketed (Beevor appends a lengthy and impressive list of her films), and she even partied with Chaplin in Hollywood. But after the Nazis took power in the 1930s, Olga found herself playing a particularly unsavory role, with Hitler, Goebbels, et al., as the creepiest of costars. She struggled throughout the war to protect herself, her career, and her family, but Beevor believes she probably did not spy much in any traditional sense, though her relatively comfortable postwar life in West Germany certainly raised eyebrows. The author knows his way around the relevant archives and had access to knowledgeable folks (he interviewed one of Olga ’s Nazi lovers), but he concludes that none of this material can provide an entire answer to the question of what services Olga might have given to the Soviets.
Literate, lucent, and well researched: a fascinating glimpse into how artists respond as the world explodes around them. (44 b&w illustrations, not seen; 1 map)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03340-5
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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