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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 BERGER | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
An account of how one family of Polish Jews, with one son born at the close of World War II and the other son born in a displaced persons camp on the margins of Berlin, narrowly survived Hitler's atrocities and managed to emerge anew amid the bewildering landscape of Manhattan's Upper West Side and the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s.
Author Notes
Joseph Berger was born in Russia in 1944 & came to the United States when he was five years old. Currently deputy education editor at "The New York Times", he has also reported on religion & education for the paper & served as its bureau chief in White Plains. The author of "The Young Scientists", Berger lives in Larchmont, New York, with his wife & daughter.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Proustian fashion, this memoir begins with a flood of memories triggered by a seeded roll, a staple of Manhattan bakeries that was an early childhood treat for the author, who, along with his parents and brother, was a Polish-Jewish refugee living on New York's Upper West Side in the 1940s. From the smell and taste of fresh-baked bread, Berger, deputy education editor at the New York Times and author of The Young Scientists, tumbles headfirst into a tale about survival in a new country that was dangerous and mysterious as much as it was a haven of safety. Written in simple, elegant prose, the book largely focuses on Berger's parents' lives (particularly before the war). His father, whose Yiddish gave the family vital access to the city's Jewish community even though the author viewed it as "the mark of a conversational cripple," is a quiet man who could be moved to violence when necessary to protect his family. His mother conveys to her children the complex tapestry of their European heritage. Both come alive in this vivid narrative, softened by a reflective somberness that is only occasionally tinged by nostalgia. Berger frequently interrupts his own story with shorter anecdotes in the voices of his parents, who tell stories about their families and their childhoods that both enhance and illuminate the primary story. By conjuring a complexly interwoven familial history that takes the reader across the boundaries of time, Berger lays the foundation for his thoughts about the larger immigrant experience. Agent, Joel Fishman. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A memorable, literate work on the immigrant experience in postwar America. Born in Russia in 1944 to Polish Jews who had fled east to escape the Nazis, Berger ( The Young Scientists , 1994) came with his family to New York five years later. The move was a blessing for Berger, who thereafter grew up in a cosmopolitan city full of immigrants from all over the world shedding their languages and manners to start anew. But it was a mixed blessing for his mother, who was more set in her ways and less eager to become an American. You were foolish, she complained to her long-suffering husband. We should have gone to Israel. Both parents labored endlessly so that Berger and his brother could have a fighting chance in their new home (and fight the boys did, he writes, in a neighborhood full of tough Irish and Italian kids). Academically gifted, Berger went on to become a writer on education and religion for the New York Times . But his true education, to gauge by this memoir, came from his mother, whose diaries he quotes and who emerges from their pages as a sensitive, thoughtful observer of the human condition; her childhood lost to a brutal war, she would fulfill her dreams only late in life, when she entered college and earned a degree. His parents had their difficulties in contending with American realities, but they endured, leaving Berger with a twofold sense of self: on one hand the American (used to high-paying jobs and a nice home) and on the other the immigrant (who tinges all comfort with a sense of raw peril, terror of imminent poverty, and, sometimes, shame at ones foreignness). A fine addition to the literature of the Holocaust (that permanent tribal wound, engraved on our souls) and a good account of recent American history.
Booklist Review
Berger, a New York Times reporter, was born in Russia in 1944 and came to New York with his parents and three-year-old brother in March 1950. His parents were Polish Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust. They came to the U.S. because they had no place else to go; they had lost their homes, their parents, their brothers and sisters, their villages and neighborhoods. Berger recalls what it was like being a child of people who survived the war and found refuge in the U.S., taking pride in the ordeals his parents had surmounted but also being embarrassed by their awkwardness in a strange land. Berger points out that they--like other refugee parents--lavished volumes of attention on him and his brother and that the two boys would provide the affection and entertainment that the dead no longer could. Berger vividly chronicles their extraordinary lives. --George Cohen
Library Journal Review
Born in Russia in 1944, Berger (deputy education editor at the New York Times) narrowly survived the Holocaust and came to America after the war. Here is his account of displacement. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
