Reviews for Whole Wide World without Limits: International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893-1930

The average rating for Whole Wide World without Limits: International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893-1930 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-12 00:00:00 Alex Hernandez This is a book that is in some ways brilliant and in others uneven and hard to connect with. I loved the illustrations and the humor was at times very compelling. And I love the opening comic with Bruno Schulz, Charlotte Salomon, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Hannah Arendt talking about the difficulty of experiencing integrated selfhood and the strange divide between the internal and external self, and the unspeakableness and unknowableness and unreachableness of language and meaning as the Holocaust comes into being. Below is the image. I hope it is okay to post it here. (If it is an infringement of any kind, let me know and I'll take it down.) Reading the reviews of this book on Goodreads I was surprised so many people gave it two stars. It seems people wanted a drama-filled book, Eisenstein's parents' horror stories, more than they wanted to hear about her life (as the child of people who had survived horrors that are so often spoken of, but nevertheless unspeakable and unimaginable.) It makes me uncomfortable that people want "more drama" more "holocaust" and less of the introspective, inquisitive writing that Eisenstein offers. For, this isn't a book called "My Parents the Holocaust Survivors." It is one that sets out to explore the experience of growing up around people whose silences are louder and--for a young child who doesn't understand them but feels them quite powerfully--more terrifying and destructive than words. The experience of knowing there is some great force and matter that is keeping everything in its gravitational orbit but is not, itself, visible, is the one I think she is trying to get at. And her writing is at times very graceful. Only I found myself having trouble going back and forth between the more conversational stories and philosophical reflections (hinted at by the above comic). I was drawn in by both, but not necessarily able to stay engaged with the structure and the ambivalent tone (it was as if there were two separate books in here wrestling it out, and maybe that is something I should be more curious about. Rather than see it as a fault, see it as part of the fact that a book is nothing if not a conversation with the self and the other, the page and the world.) Here is an example of some of her rich reflections on memory as a child of Holocaust survivors. There are many stories about her childhood, her parents experiences during the war, the loss of her father, meeting her parents' friends. They are all well-enough written, I am just not always sure about the movement between story and reflection. But, I appreciate what this book is and I also appreciate what this book isn't. That it isn't something along the lines of "disaster porn." This is not a book meant to titillate people with Holocaust suffering and I am worried, after reading the reviews, that people wanted this to be a Holocaust story they could use for some kind of self-indulgent catharsis. Maybe it's just a human fascination with horror, or people want to see the world as broken up simply into good and evil, and to place themselves into the good category. That they want to feel a moment of compassion for the victims while reading a book so they can convince themselves they are one of the "good" ones and let themselves off the hook in much more complicated real life. (There is an interesting discussion about this in "The Subject of Holocaust Fiction" by Emily Miller Budick. But of course, it is not something that only pertains to the Holocaust.) It is not a bad thing to be curious about or interested in the Holocaust. But if you go to a book called "I Was A Child Of Holocaust Survivors" with the expectation of reading a detailed account of her parents' suffering, well, maybe that's something worthy of introspection. This is a book I may pick up again and I look forward to reading more of Eisenstein's work. Right now it looks like there are only two other books she's got some writing in, but one is made up of correspondences with Anne Michaels and David gave it a five star review, so I hope they have it at the library.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-04-17 00:00:00 Michelle Quintana Pensando all'Olocausto, tematica da sempre presente nelle mie letture, mi sono sempre chiesta quale sia, nel presente, l'atteggiamento e il pensiero dei figli e nipoti dei sopravvissuti, i cosiddetti "testimoni di seconda o terza generazione". Com'è stato per loro essere cresciuti ed educati da testimoni diretti di una simile tragedia? Cosa provano nel vedere filmati girati nei campi di sterminio e nel leggere testimonianze ben sapendo che i loro stessi genitori, nonni, parenti, hanno subìto la medesima sorte, sorte che tra l'altro essi stessi, se fossero vissuti qualche decennio prima, avrebbero potuto subìre? Come accolgono, se ci riescono, la grande eredità loro trasmessagli, quella del ricordo? Pensavo che questo graphic novel di Bernice Eisenstein potesse aiutarmi a rispondere a queste curiosità: il punto di vista di questa lettura, infatti, è quello di una figlia di due ebrei sopravvisuti ad Auschwitz, la quale cresce portando in sè l'ombra del loro passato. Curiosità siddisfatte, dunque? Solo in parte. La Eisenstein sviluppa questi aspetti solo in alcuni punti del libro, in maniera cauta, sottile, di striscio: si tratta di momenti rari ma profondi ed emblematici, che offrono al lettore ottimi spunti di riflessione (significativo, ad esempio, il passaggio in cui racconta di quando, da adolescenti, lei il cugino fanno conoscenza con un gruppi di coetanei non ebrei, e l'avvenimento scatena un misto di disapprovazione e paura nei loro genitori). Quanto al resto, l'autrice si dilunga in descrizioni delle usanze della sua famiglia, dei primi anni del matrimonio dei genitori, degli hobbies del padre, quasi volesse, nel suo inconscio, sviare dall'obiettivo principale che si era prefissa scrivendo il libro. Ma d'altronde mi rendo conto della difficoltà di scrivere su un tema simile, da parte di chi ha sempre voluto chiedere e sapere ma non sempre ha ottenuto le risposte che voleva e così è andato a cercarsele...e le risposte hanno fatto male. In conclusione il bilancio del libro resta comunque buono. Ero indecisa fra due stelline e tre, ma alla fine ho optato per tre, per premiare la volontà e il coraggio dell'autrice di scrivere su un tema simile dal suo punto di vista e perchè no, anche per i frequenti bei disegni disseminati in tutto il libro.