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
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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