A terribly poignant work that conveys the brutal reality of the time through intimate connection with a young person.
Personality and hope abound in this diary by a teenage Polish Jewish girl who was murdered by the Nazis in 1942.
Presented by her younger sister, Elizabeth (b. 1930), the diary freezes the life of Renia (b. 1924), who began writing in 1939, in a specific moment in time. “In the end,” writes Elizabeth, “I know my words are the legacy of the life my sister didn’t get to have, while Renia’s are the memories of a youth trapped forever in war.” Much like the better-known diaries of Anne Frank and Hélène Berr, Renia’s entries are filled with day-to-day schoolgirl details, but the war consistently looms in the background. Stuck in a small city in southeastern Poland, Renia and her sister were shunted off to live with their grandparents while her mother was separated from them in German-occupied Warsaw. Bomb raids, sirens, attacks, and rumors about her town; food in short supply; worry about when she will see her mother again—these pepper her entries. “I still live in fear of searches, of violence,” she writes in January 1940; by June, when her birthday arrives, she is writing miserably of France’s capitulation and how “Hitler’s army is flooding Europe. America is refusing to help. Who knows, they might even start a war with Russia.” A new boyfriend fills many of her subsequent entries and poems, and her young love often disguises what is really going on, namely the herding of her community into a Jewish ghetto and the subsequent roundups. In an epilogue, Elizabeth explains her attempts to hide and eventual exposure to the Germans. Renowned Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt provides the introduction.
A terribly poignant work that conveys the brutal reality of the time through intimate connection with a young person.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-24402-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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