A patiently recounted narrative, especially informative about Nazi atrocities in Ukraine.
The inspiring story of a Ukrainian Jewish girl trained as a pianist who performed for the Nazis to avoid capture.
The author’s mother, Zhanna Arshanskaya, did not discuss her plight with her son when he was a child living in “blissful ignorance” with his musician-teacher parents in Bloomington, Ind. Seasoned journalist Dawson, now a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, re-creates the terrifying war era by furnishing brief first-person memories in the voice of his mother that alternate with the main historical narrative, which begins with Zhanna and her younger sister, Frina, learning to play the piano at the behest of their father, Dmitri, a candy maker and violinist. As the sisters’ progressed in their musical studies, the family moved to Kharkov so that the girls could attend the city’s prestigious conservatory. But in 1941, when Zhanna was 14, “the German army moved inexorably, and murderously, across the Ukraine.” As Zhanna’s family was marching toward the killing ravines, Dmitri urged his daughter to flee: “I don’t care what you do, just live. Go!” After escaping into the countryside, Zhanna was eventually reunited with her sister. The young girls relied on strangers’ kindness and were coached to reinvent identities for themselves until their piano-playing in an orphanage caught the attention of the music school. They played for the German soldiers and then were sent as a troupe of performers to Berlin and—in a sick twist—on tour to slave-labor camps. Eventually the sisters’ musical gifts earned them passage to America and enormous later achievement, as Dawson gracefully sums up.
A patiently recounted narrative, especially informative about Nazi atrocities in Ukraine.Pub Date: July 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-045-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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