by Susan Nathan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2005
Complementing Donna Rosenthal’s iconoclastic study The Israelis (2003), Nathan’s book offers an optimistic—if...
A record of life in the “other Israel,” a place not found in travel brochures nor, usually, in headlines.
“A fact almost unknown outside Israel is that the Jewish state includes a large minority of one million Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship,” writes English-born counselor Nathan. This minority, about a fifth of the population, lives mostly apart from the Jewish majority, leading parallel but almost always poorer lives. When, at the age of 56, she decides to relocate from Tel Aviv to Tamra, a sizeable Palestinian town in Galilee, Nathan’s Jewish Israeli friends warn her that she will be killed, raped or kidnapped; the movers refuse to return to retrieve her empty moving boxes, and of course no one comes to see how she’s doing. The fact, Nathan writes, is that she’s doing just fine living solo among the disenfranchised people of Tamra, salt-of-the-earth types who fear traveling in Jewish areas as much as their Jewish compatriots fear traveling in Arab climes. Nathan writes affectingly of the lives of the people of Tamra, most of whom have little experience beyond the town limits and retain something of the old-fashioned ways, some of which Nathan has made her own: “Since living in Tamra,” she writes, “I find myself appalled every time I return to Europe or America to see the virtually pornographic images of women, and even children, crowding high street billboards.” Nathan’s defense of her newfound neighbors is earnest but not overbearing, though she overplays the theme of the unusualness of her situation as a single Jewish woman among Palestinians. We understand, enough to wince when a Ha’aretz reporter comes calling and Nathan proudly observes, “I was the star of a freak show, and she was intrigued to see my act.”
Complementing Donna Rosenthal’s iconoclastic study The Israelis (2003), Nathan’s book offers an optimistic—if unlikely—vision of a multiethnic nation without divides.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51456-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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