These powerful inquiries spurred by photos are history made flesh, the untold lives of the mostly forgotten.
The clash of fascism and communism on two continents over half a century, as traced through a few family photographs.
At one point, author and award-winning translator Hackl (Argentina’s Angel, 2014, etc.) describes his methodology as “a question-and-answer carousel between here and there: the basic data, rather sparse, not very vivid, without feelings, which our imagination has to supply.” The “our” in the reading of this book is the reader, because even though the elements are tragic, even horrific, the author’s tone remains matter-of-fact and speculative. Hackl is like an investigating detective pursuing a case where all the principals are long dead and the few who remain may be reluctant to talk. The first and longest of these files concerns a family threatened by anti-Semitic Austrian fascism; some of them moved to Brazil only to find a “dictatorship [that] must have seemed like a variant of Austro-fascism with a tropical gloss.” Two of them attempted to return to Austria but found themselves in what seemed like “a permanently provisional arrangement” between the country that was home and the Brazil that had become home. The piece begins and ends with a photo, though “invisible on this picture are the threads linking times and continents.” The second and shortest, “The Photographer of Auschwitz,” tells of the prisoner who was a photographer and was charged with documenting new arrivals, taking as many as 50,000 photos. One of the images became indelible—“four Jewish girls, naked, emaciated until they’re nothing more than skeletons, looking at us with big eyes. Four thirteen-year-olds who are about to die and are immensely ashamed of their nakedness.” Another is “the only cheerful photo from Auschwitz, of a wedding.” The third section also features a wedding photo from a concentration camp: two incarcerated dissidents, only one of whom would survive, and the son who tried to come to terms with their history and his life “in time-lapse photography. Because they are years of repressed memory.”
These powerful inquiries spurred by photos are history made flesh, the untold lives of the mostly forgotten.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9970034-3-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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