Reception
Elie Wiesel reviewed the book shortly after its publication. He wrote in part "This admirable account is as important in every aspect as the one bequeathed to us by Anne Frank. Annie's ambivalent relationships with her father, her sister, the family that sheltered her, her discovery of concentration camp horror – we laugh with her and cry with her. With her we await D-Day and liberation, sharing her anxieties and her dreams. In the end, we are grateful to fate for having spared a child who can reminisce with neither hate nor bitterness but a kind of gentleness that leaves us with a lump in our throats."
The book won many awards including a 1973 Newbery Honor and the 1973 National Jewish Book Award for best children's book.
A 2009 The New York Times article noted about the book: "Compared with Anne Frank’s 'Diary of a Young Girl,' it is sparer and sterner: Frank, unaware of her tragic fate, radiated lively, optimistic, girlish intensity, while Reiss wrote 'The Upstairs Room' after much of her hope and appetite for life had been extinguished. One expects the survivor to be the more expansive writer, but like so many Holocaust victims, Reiss was left emotionally crippled, fearful of being violently murdered, always ready to hide."
Read more about this topic: The Upstairs Room
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)