Using a series of brief, fragmented descriptions, Agos°n (who edited What Is Secret: Stories by Chilean Women, 1996, and other volumes) reconstructs the wanderings and difficulties of her family Agos°n’s grandparents, a tailor and a cigarette-roller, began their travels at the beginning of this century when they fled Russia for Istanbul to escape anti-Jewish pogroms. From Istanbul, they moved with their children to Marseilles in France, where Agos°n’s father was born, before sailing to Chile, where they hoped to escape poverty with the help of a relative who ran a successful business in Valparaiso. Once in Chile, the family settled in Quillota; they were the only Jewish family in the small town. Despite their attempts to assimilate (Agos°n’s grandfather gave up speaking Russian and her grandmother would only light the Sabbath candles after all the windows in the house had been covered with wrapping paper), Agos°n’s father MoisÇs was always considered an outsider. Excluded from the private schools of the upper and middle classes, MoisÇs went to the public school and eventually left Quillota to study medicine. But even as a university doctor in Santiago, MoisÇs continued to encounter anti-Semitism. In 1968, student protests and slanderous newspaper articles forced him to close his prestigious research labs. Shortly thereafter, he moved his family to Athens, Ga., never to return to Chile. Though Agos°n’s complicated family history is a worthy subject for a memoir, her melodramatic, overly sentimentalized writing robs the story of its power. Agos°n continually casts her family as saints in a sinning world—apparently they never fought, never had a character flaw. The result is that, though the prejudice her family encountered was deplorable and undeserved, Agos°n’s black-and-white portrayal makes the history of their difficulties ring hollow, the stuff of allegories and fairy tales, not real life. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55861-195-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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