In the process of assimilating disparate facts into a poignant and elegant story, Adorján exposes her own hopes and fears,...
Berlin-based journalist Adorján’s debut examines why and how her grandparents committed suicide together, decades after they survived the Holocaust.
In life, Vera and Pista refused to discuss how Pista lived through his time in Mauthausen, the Nazi concentration camp notorious for its vast labor complex, or how Vera obtained the forged papers that allowed her to evade capture and give birth to Adorján’s father in a proper hospital. In her intrepid investigation, the author learned what she could from speaking to relatives and interviewing the few friends her grandparents left behind, elderly women who corroborated that her grandparents kept the world at arm’s length. Vera was convinced that no one but Pista loved her, and Pista was dependent on Vera in all practical affairs. Recollections from Adorján’s childhood depict a handsome, cultured couple who dressed impeccably and smoked incessantly. The essence of the grandparents’ relationship surfaces in their final-day preparations, which the author vividly imagines and intersperses throughout the book: Vera cleaning the house and wrapping gifts to bequeath to relatives, checking in periodically on Pista, who had been ill for some time. Between snoozing on the sofa and smoking cigarillos, he emptied pill capsules for consumption later. Final Exit, the 1991 bestseller about euthanasia, shaped the plan to ingest a lethal dosage of painkillers for which Pista, a former surgeon, wrote a prescription. However, Adorján suspects that her grandparents resolved never to live apart when they were still young. Her personal revelations make up for her inability to completely surmount the privacy her grandparents meticulously guarded. Feeling cheated out of the Jewish legacy her grandparents ignored once they were safe in Denmark, Adorján explores her Jewish identity by trying JDate, which proves unsuccessful, and traveling to Israel, where she found peace among the legions of Jews she had been seeking all along.
In the process of assimilating disparate facts into a poignant and elegant story, Adorján exposes her own hopes and fears, an added bonus.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-08001-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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 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
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