A moving guide to a practice that can connect one generation with another, sure to strike a chord in readers familiar with...
Goldman (Being Jewish, 2000, etc.) examines a central practice of his religion in this account of the yearlong mourning ritual he observed after his devout father died.
Jewish in the Modern Orthodox mode, the author undertook each day from September 1999 through August 2000 to recite the customary Kaddish, a reverent prayer in honor of the dead that never mentions death. A minyan of at least ten men (though some now count women too) must pray together for a mourner to properly utter Kaddish, which requires affirmations of “amen” to the words of praise. Goldman (Journalism/Columbia Univ.) describes the varied ways in which a minyan is gathered, nicely characterizing the participants who supported him in his regular Upper West Side minyan and at gatherings overseas. As a badge of grief, mourners traditionally do not buy new clothing and avoid live music and other entertainments. Like much Jewish practice, this custom is observed according to an individual’s understanding and philosophy. The author demonstrates his own way of dealing with tradition, considering the tension between simple observance and overarching theology. He does not offer instruction for all but rather one person’s appreciation of the value of worship integrated into everyday life. His family-centered memoir memorializes his parents, divorced for many years but united in the regard and respect of their son. “The riches they left me,” he writes, “do not need to be probated in court. There is no estate tax.” Goldman is thankful for the far greater gift they bestowed, that of an ancient ethical tradition.
A moving guide to a practice that can connect one generation with another, sure to strike a chord in readers familiar with Judaic custom and also in those who have no notion of it.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2003
ISBN: 0-8052-4184-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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