A creative, unusual mix of memoir and travel narrative.
Canadian playwright and poet Garfinkel (Glass Psalms, 2005, etc.) considers the quandary of Zionism in this account of his travels in Israel and Palestine.
Planning a trip to Israel with his devout Jewish girlfriend, the author happened to meet a Palestinian immigrant whose descriptions of her harsh life in Jerusalem contradicted the rosy pictures painted by his teachers at Bialik Hebrew Day School. But she also told him of a house in Jerusalem shared by its original Palestinian owner and a Jewish couple who moved in after the Six Day War. The house suggested a model for coexistence to Garfinkel, who decided to write a play about it and headed for Israel alone; he felt he needed to find out the truth about the occupation for himself. That journey permanently changed his relationship to his religion and his past. Describing his two trips to the Holy Land in the mid-’90s, the author provides a stirring portrait of day-to-day life in modern Jerusalem. Garfinkel’s courage and curiosity led him far beyond the typical tourist’s itinerary, into adventures as exciting and heartbreaking as anything found in a work of fiction. Crossing back and forth through the checkpoints, he witnessed suffering, violence and acrimony intermixed with fierce friendship, generosity and the widespread thirst for normalcy. Intense ambivalence suffuses this aptly titled book. Garfinkel exhibits genuine respect for both sides of the conflict, but resists simplifying the notoriously intricate matrix of religion, property rights, violence and conflicting views of history that he encountered. Forced by his experiences to modify long-held beliefs about the Jewish state, he writes honestly and humorously about his ignorance, prejudices and discoveries. He effectively weaves in lively flashbacks starring the ever-present specter of Mrs. Blintzkrieg, the fieriest of Bialik Hebrew Day’s Zionist teachers. Garfinkel’s abilities as a playwright enrich the text, which is studded with brief, dramatic scenes distilling the emotional essence of each encounter or relationship.
A creative, unusual mix of memoir and travel narrative.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06674-6
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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