A searing, astute study of intensive healing and self-acceptance through the absolution of suffering and atrocity.
A mental health professional braids stories of her patients’ epiphanies with her own personal journey through Nazi Germany.
As a Holocaust survivor and clinical psychologist, 89-year-old Eger is often introduced to her audiences at speaking engagements as “the Anne Frank who didn’t die.” Her poignantly crafted memoir is a meditation on two motifs: the internal struggle of psychologically troubled individuals and the deep shadows cast upon the future of a concentration camp survivor. As a teenager living as the “silent sister” in a dynamic Jewish-Hungarian family in Czechoslovakia, the author recalls being forcibly “resettled” to a labor camp and then transported by train as “human cargo” to Auschwitz, where her parents were promptly executed. Eger was somehow spared, and notoriously sadistic executioner Josef Mengele commanded her to dance in exchange for rare bread rations. Sent to other concentration camps, she was plucked, nearly lifeless, from a carcass heap as the war ended. She married, bore children, befriended fellow survivor Viktor Frankl, and began the “cautious joy” of a new life and career in America. Yet she grew desperate to redress a history scarred by evil: “I began to formulate a new relationship with my own trauma.” Crosscutting this intensely bittersweet narrative are portraitures of the author’s clinical patients, many of whose experiences mirrored much of what Eger had to overcome in order to thrive in society. She intriguingly compares her office sessions, and in mining the roots of pain and victimization, she declares that “suffering is universal…but victimhood is optional.” The distressed fabric of the author’s traumatic past becomes a beautiful backdrop for a memoir written with integrity and conviction. Throughout, Eger is strong in her knowledge of what makes life better for those of us willing to relinquish past “regret and unresolved grief” and “enjoy the full, rich feast of life.”
A searing, astute study of intensive healing and self-acceptance through the absolution of suffering and atrocity.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3078-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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BOOK REVIEW
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