A powerful and unusually eloquent memoir of a prominent Austrian Holocaust survivor invited back to face and forgive old ghosts and demons. Weiss is a prominent Israeli immunologist and author of books on Jewish law and philosophy, who made traumatic returns to the eastern Europe that he fled as an 11-year-old boy. After serving as a young interrogator for the American army after the war, Weiss’s first adult return was as a biomedical speaker at a scientific conference. But this account centers on his 1995 return to his Austrian hometown of Wiener Neustadt. Weiss was particularly wanted by the Ichthys mission of independent Christians of the town because his father had been the chief rabbi. This mission, and its major project, “A Week of Return,” was aimed at reconciliation with the town’s surviving Jewish exiles. This church breaks from normative theology and believes that God “will not illuminate the Christian world until amends are made to his chosen people.” Much of the memoir’s power and drama revolve around Weiss’s reluctant decision to return and address the children of the people who were so violently anti-Jewish. Along the way, Weiss presents a concise summary of the seven centuries of Jewish history in Austria, leading to his family background, and how they escaped the Nazis and got to New York. On the road, he accepted an invitation to confer with specialists in Israel, and this Berkeley radical had “the plain, overwhelming knowledge of being home.” Living in Israel since 1966, Weiss, with his son and grandson, is able to return to his hometown’s only surviving Jewish site—a row of tombstones now embedded in the town wall—and to give his life and the Ichthys community some closure. An intelligent and profound memoir. (25 b&w photos, 1 map)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-253-33584-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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