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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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