To his credit, Hays doesn’t oversentimentalize things; to his discredit, he never makes his journey the story it could have...
A semiretired theater director, at age 66, finally becomes a man.
When Hays approached his rabbi at his local diner and mentioned that he was interested in being bar mitzvahed, he expected to be talked out of it. Rabbi Doug instead enthusiastically gave Hays his vote of confidence and an impromptu lesson in Hebrew. By the following autumn Hays found himself the sole adult in a classroom with seven other students. Without stressing too laboriously the sentimental ironies and poignancies of his inner-child’s journey toward the bema, Hays describes how he spent the rest of the schoolyear tackling prayers, participating in class discussions, going on field trips, drawing pictures in crayon on newsprint, and monitoring the changes in the other students—whom he dubbed the Hormone Hurricanes—and himself. (He even developed an avuncular version of a schoolboy crush on one of the girls at school.) Events in the extracurricular life of a 66-year-old man being of a different nature than the cusp-of-puberty changes in preadolescence, the account of his year of learning the V’ahavta has a unique tone; there were several deaths of former colleagues and various relations, including his own mother. The narrative has texture to spare, but it lacks the structure and shapeliness that might have made it more compelling. A timeline would have helped (at one point the story jumps ahead a couple of months, only to jump back a few chapters on), and far too many details about the specifics of bar mitzvah study and the ceremony itself are withheld (gentile readers may find themselves as uninformed at the end as they were at the start). From the weightlessness of the sketchy prose it seems that Hays gave great attention to his religious study at the expense of his literary project; his story feels reconstituted from notes scribbled between the lines of Hebrew lessons rather than shaped by observation, selection, and retrospection.
To his credit, Hays doesn’t oversentimentalize things; to his discredit, he never makes his journey the story it could have been. A disappointment.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-7432-0126-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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