A masterful chronicle of dark and dangerous years, and a distinguished addition to the history of totalitarianism.
A journalist’s memoir of her grandmothers also paints an eloquent portrait of two totalitarian powers, the havoc they wrought, and the countless burdens they imposed on ordinary families.
Gessen, who emigrated to America as a teenager but moved back to Moscow in 1994, deftly weaves the story of the two women’s lives with her reactions to their experience. Like all people who survive authoritarian regimes, both made certain compromises: Ruzya served as an official censor for many years under Stalin, and Ester accepted a position as an NKVD lieutenant, only to be turned down when she failed the physical. Gessen doesn’t gloss over these events, but comes to appreciate the realities of her grandmothers’ lives and understand their respective situations. Both were Jewish, which made their already difficult lives even more fraught. Ester, born in Bialystok in what was then Poland, lost most of her family in the Holocaust; she escaped because she was a student in Moscow. It was there, in the late 1940s, that she met native-born Ruzya at a mutual friend’s party. Postwar life was perilous for Jews, accused by Stalin of plotting against the state and frequently denied jobs; they feared strangers and socialized only with trusted friends. Ester and Ruzya formed a bond, affectionately evoked by their granddaughter, that sustained them over the years. Ruyza, widowed during the war, later remarried; Ester was divorced in 1957 and also remarried. Their friendship began when their children were young, and Sasha, Ester’s son, grew up to marry Ruzya’s daughter, Yolochka. Anti-Semitism, which had continued to scar their mothers’ lives, led the couple to leave for the US in 1981. Finally, with perestroika, they were able to return to see their mothers in 1988 and arrange for Ester and Ruzya make visits to America.
A masterful chronicle of dark and dangerous years, and a distinguished addition to the history of totalitarianism.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33604-7
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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