A readable, provocative rejoinder to Tom Segev’s 1967, Gershom Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire and other recent works on...
Must one be Zionist to be Israeli, or even Jewish? Historian Brecher, former director of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, ponders the question.
The author, born in Tel Aviv but long resident in his parents’ native Germany, returned to Israel in the 1960s. In Germany, he writes, “most parents of the Jewish children I grew up with made do with abstract, summary remarks when their experiences during the persecution came up.” In Israel, conversely, his historian colleagues “wanted to steer me out of the darkness and confusion of the Diaspora” and urged him to embrace a vision of a Jewish people living in a secular culture in which they were neither oppressed nor assimilated, or assimilated to the extent that its members were “new Jews,” namely Israelis, ethnically dominant in a country of their own. “How could I, as a German Jew, accept such a nationalistic principle of nation and nationality?” writes Brecher. He could not, it develops, for he became convinced that such status was possible only at the expense of the land’s Arab inhabitants. Though surrounded by 100 million Arabs, he urges, Israel is the Goliath of lore, a modern industrial nation with a powerful army set against corrupt and ineffectual countries that could not manage even to feed their own people. His views earned him enemies and cost him a certain amount of influence in his work as a military historian, but, as he writes in this combination of memoir and history, he pressed his case as a lecturer and as an activist in the nascent Israeli peace movement. Only when Israeli society acknowledges the injustices the nation has committed, he concludes, will that peace be possible, though “this is predicated on a political maturity . . . that is not yet in evidence.”
A readable, provocative rejoinder to Tom Segev’s 1967, Gershom Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire and other recent works on modern Israel.Pub Date: July 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59051-211-1
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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