A blend of family history and world history that starts out strong—the Russian years are by far the most compelling—but runs...
The life of a Russian grandmother, a woman in the wrong places at the wrong times.
Using family memorabilia, the recollections of friends and relatives, plus newspaper files and historical archives, British journalist Williams (Hongkong Bank, 1989, etc.) has pieced together a large portion of the life of her grandmother, Olga Yunter, who was born in 1890 in Siberia and died in 1973 in England. The homely details of life in Siberia in the early-20th-century fill the first chapters, but WWII and the Russian Revolution brought uncertainty, death and chaos, changing Olga’s life forever. After two of her brothers were killed in 1919, her father gave her a handful of rubies and gold nuggets to sew into her clothing, put her on a horse and sent her east to Vladivostok. Within a few months she was on the run again, this time to Tientsin, China, a city filled with Russian refugees also fleeing from the Reds. There, she learned English, and in 1923 married a young Englishman, Fred Edney, thereby gaining a certain security. Olga began transforming herself into a proper English housewife, one who was not, however, quite acceptable to Fred’s family back in England. Home leaves, granted every five years by Fred’s employer, were disappointing affairs. Still, life in the European sectors of Tientsin and later Shanghai was comfortable and relatively safe until 1940, when Japan signed a military alliance with Italy and Germany. Staying in China then became too dangerous, and once again, Olga was on the run, this time to Canada, where friends had offered refuge. The author gives scant coverage to the WWII years, to Olga’s 1945 reunion with her husband, interned by the Japanese, or to their subsequent life in Shanghai. By 1948, Communist forces were advancing, and Olga and her husband again fled, eventually finding sanctuary in England.
A blend of family history and world history that starts out strong—the Russian years are by far the most compelling—but runs out of steam long before Olga does.Pub Date: June 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50851-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
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