A deeply felt story and a sobering reminder of the long shadows of the Holocaust.
A searing survivor’s tale told by a son.
This English language debut by Swedish writer and TV personality Rosenberg is both a personal journey and a son’s letter to a loving father, David, who survived Nazi Germany but never got over it. Drawing on both historical research and family documents, the author re-creates the life of a Polish Jew who saw his hometown turned into a barbed wire hell in which 200,000 people, including his father and brother, lost their lives. Throughout the book, Rosenberg tries to picture what David saw and heard: Was he there when Jewish leader Chaim Rumkowski told the gathered throng that he had reached a bargain with the Nazis and only sick people and small children would be liquidated? David was sent to Auschwitz, which he survived only to spend the last desperate days of the war at the Wöbbelin concentration camp, where Nazis tried killing off as many Jews as possible before the liberators arrived. After the war, the ambitious David and his wife settled in the Swedish factory town of Södertälje, outside of Stockholm, for what they hoped would only be a “brief stop” on the road to a bigger, brighter future. Instead, it was a dead end. David’s dreams were at constant war with his recurring nightmares. “What I realize, much later,” writes the author, “is that time after time you make a run-up toward the horizon, and time after time you fall back to earth again.” Rosenberg was constantly asking his father why: Why this direction and not that one? Why didn’t you follow through on your dreams? It isn’t until the devastating ending that we see just why these questions loomed so large in his head.
A deeply felt story and a sobering reminder of the long shadows of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59051-607-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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