A lyrical and literary memoir of an unusual Sephardic Jewish family. The Alhadeffs made and lost more than one fortune in the Italian Jewish communities in Rhodes and Alexandria well before Gini was born, by which time her branch of the family was both Catholic and solidly middle class. In fact, Alhadeff didn't even realize she was from illustrious Jewish ancestry until she was 22 and living in New York City: Someone asked her if she was a Sephardic Jew. ``No,'' she said, then, ``I don't know,'' and finally, ``Yes, maybe.'' Suddenly, all the signs that she'd noticed throughout her convent-school upbringing became clear. She goes over them here, commenting on her multilingual relatives (who have taken up, discarded, and then retrieved a number of religions) with insight and an uncanny knack for detail. Her mother's family, the Tilches, are seen in the full pride and pathos of their fallen glory. Although they can trace their ancestry in Egypt back to the 16th century and were once wealthy cotton merchants, they are now forced to live on the kindness of inferior relations. Nelly Tilche, Alhadeff's great-aunt, stays with Alhadeff's family and justifies her place with them by leading a crusade against missing and frayed underwear, searching, darning, and even speaking up for ``the disappeared.'' Alhadeff's cousin Pierre is a poor priest who drops the names of the rich and famous and lives the life of a celibate playboy. Alhadeff injects a more somber note, however, in the story of her uncle Nissim, who was captured in Rome during WW II and sent to Auschwitz. Told in Nissim's voice, this long passage is stark and moving. Alhadeff tackles complex relationships with humor and wisdom; listening to her reminiscences is an entertaining, frequently surprising, and moving experience.
Pub Date: Feb. 19, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-41763-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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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