In this winner of the European Book Prize, Leo not only produces a moving family memoir, but also a probing exploration of...
A prize-winning German journalist’s account of how he revisited his family’s socialist past to find answers about his parents' relationship to him and to each other.
The self-proclaimed “bourgeois” of his family, Berliner Zeitung editor Maxim grew up in East Berlin. His parents, Anne and Wolf, were rebels who often made him wish “they could be as normal as all the other parents I knew.” Part of what made them different was that Anne was from West Germany and Wolf, from the East. Gerhard, Anne’s father, fought with the French Resistance and then returned home after the war to build the East German state. By contrast, Werner, Wolf’s father, was a French prisoner of war who returned home a broken man who found his balm in East German socialism. Following the idealism of her father, Anne developed a desire to “put her life at the service of the [Socialist] Party” and became a journalist like Gerhard. Eventually, she abandoned her career when she could not tolerate the censorship she witnessed or the outright lies she saw published, and she retreated into university life. Yet, however disenchanted she was with the East German state, “she remain[ed] a Socialist deep down.” Wolf had a more openly critical attitude toward prevailing political ideology. An artist, he expressed his opinions through his work, nervously aware of the tightrope he walked between ideological conformity and resistance. When change finally came to East Germany in 1989, Anne was able to distance herself from the “unhappy [socialist] love of her youth” thanks to her academic training. But Wolf “missed the security he had previously found so constricting,” and the “long love and long argument” that had been his marriage to Anne finally came to end.
In this winner of the European Book Prize, Leo not only produces a moving family memoir, but also a probing exploration of the human need to believe and belong.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-908968-51-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
