The author shapes his family’s labor of a lifetime into a scintillating work of art.
A prizewinning historian recounts his German-Jewish family’s time in England during the most turbulent years of the 20th century.
A treasure trove of love letters, produced over five decades and discovered locked in steel boxes in a barn, provided the raw materials from which Buruma (Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism/Bard Coll.; Year Zero: A History of 1945, 2014, etc.) has shaped the fascinating story of his grandparents Bernard and Win Schlesinger. Both were children of German Jews who had immigrated to Britain in the 19th century and prospered. So, too, did their children, who, for the author, represent “the old immigrant story” of advancing through “higher education and prosperity.” Buruma, however, probes the tensions below the surface of the family's apparent success. Never distant from their family connections in Germany, they were also targets of anti-Semitism in England. Both Bernard and Win served in World War I; Win was a nurse, and Bernard was a stretcher-bearer on the Western front. However, anti-Semitism ultimately stymied Bernard’s career as a doctor. “The senior job is not for me at any price,” he wrote in 1938 after rejection by St. Thomas's Hospital. Before the horrors of Kristallnacht, Win and Bernard had begun to set up a hostel where they sheltered rescued Jewish children. Raised by their parents as normal Germans, most had no idea why they were singled out for persecution. The family also found time to raise a family of five, which included future award-winning movie director John Schlesinger. During World War II, Bernard wrote daily from India, even knowing delivery was months away at best. On May 8th, 1945, he wrote, “my Beloved…on this historic day I must send you a word of love…perhaps now after this war people will finally work out their salvation.” Buruma impressively captures his grandparents’ remarkable lives in this insightful narrative.
The author shapes his family’s labor of a lifetime into a scintillating work of art.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-438-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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