An intimate look at the horror wrought by Hitler.
The story of a Jewish family who watched in fear as a new neighbor rose to power.
In 1929, Feuchtwanger (Albert and Victoria, 2009, etc.), a former history professor in England, was 5 years old and living in an elegant Munich neighborhood with his parents when the family noticed that someone important had moved in across the street. He was Adolf Hitler, the leader of the rising Nazi Party, a man whom the young Feuchtwanger would sometimes pass in the street and could see in his windows. The Feuchtwangers were Jewish, and they felt consternation and confusion as the Nazis gained support, Hitler was named chancellor, and anti-Semitism flared into violence. With the assistance and encouragement of French journalist Scali, the author draws on his own recollections, a family memoir published in Germany, contemporary journals and newspapers, and the works of his uncle, writer Lion Feuchtwanger, to create a vivid, close-up picture of his experiences at school, where his teacher was an ardent Nazi; his increasing isolation from non-Jewish schoolmates; and the loss of his beloved nanny, forbidden to work for a Jewish family. Although friends and other family members left earlier, the Feuchtwangers were slower to acknowledge their vulnerability. “We’ve lived in Germany for more than four hundred years,” said the author’s father. “This madness will blow over like all the others that we Feuchtwangers have survived!” Still, he saw clearly that Hitler was a menace: “His friends are dangerous, ill-educated lunatics. But Hitler is the worst of the lot.” Although the author’s mother wanted to leave at the first sign of repression, his father claimed there was nowhere they could go: visas were hard to obtain, they spoke only German, and they would have to forfeit all their wealth and possessions. Once, he made a scouting expedition to Palestine, where relatives lived, but deemed the country unsuitable. But after Kristallnacht and Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, he finally acted, and the author, followed by his family, immigrated to England.
An intimate look at the horror wrought by Hitler.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59051-864-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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