A slim, largely cerebral, yet sometimes deeply engaging autobiography by a Holocaust survivor who has become one of the greatest talmudic scholars of the postwar era. Halivni, professor of religion at Columbia University and author of the nine-volume commentary Sources and Traditions, grew up in the town of Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains, the same village where Elie Wiesel, a close friend, was raised. He was recognized quite early as an ilui, a talmudic prodigy. Halivni recalls how his inexhaustible love for and commitment to the Talmud, his ``bastion,'' kept him alive and sane through his separation from his parents, Auschwitz and the Gross Rosen concentration camps, and some indigent early years in America. Halivni clearly explicates his approach to the Talmud, noting how he balances ``critical'' study (non-literalist, influenced by philology and history) with a very traditionalist practice of halacha (Jewish law and observance). He explains the disagreement over the latter that drove him to resign from the Conservative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary, his home for three decades. In his eloquent resignation letter, reprinted here in full and alone worth the book's price, Halivni also writes movingly of his struggle for faith after the Holocaust, observing that ``true love is tormented love . . . The task is to reach out to heaven when it is cloudy, when heaven is no longer visible.'' The memoir is often dry, and too reticent about Halivni's life in America (his wife and sons are mentioned only twice in passing), but it is laced with more than enough moving meditations on faith and the life of a devoted student of religion to make it of considerable interest to an audience far larger than the relatively small universe of Judaica scholars. A great scholar, Halivni has not written a great memoir, but he has produced a quite good one, succinct, intellectually illuminating, and sometimes surprisingly poignant.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-11545-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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 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
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