The colorful portrait of one slice of American Jewry.
In this multi-genre religious autobiography, Schwartz offers a funny, poignant testament to the ways the secular and spiritual can merge in the life of one person.
Schwartz grew up in the Borscht Belt, the affectionate name given to communities of American Jews in upstate New York in the middle of the last century. This is his effort to capture that region’s dynamic mix of Yiddish tradition and American pride. He does so by pulling together a variety of different literary forms—Scripture, poetry, drama, memoir—and mashing them into an idiosyncratic but thoroughly appropriate celebration of the culture that created him. We get our first taste of this peculiar mashing in the book’s first piece, a “psalm” that sensitively combines praise for God with a lament for his lost children. “O Zion,” it opens, “I long for thee…O Jewel / O Treasure / O Sanctum… /…of my soul.” Yet later he shifts to mourning: “And Brenda died. / (and Sammy Orloff) / And Harry’s daughter / (from Boca Raton). / and your Mel.” This unexpected transition is so effective because the juxtaposition of communal devotion with deeply personal loss so perfectly captures the spirit of American Judaism in the mid-20th century. In other parts of the book, Schwartz shares intimate memories from his own childhood: games of “punch-ball” with neighborhood kids, run-ins with his cousin Cookie, etc. And in the book’s funniest section, he delivers hilarious revisions of Shakespeare performed at a Yiddish theater in New York. It’s all so good, so droll, so touching; the only thing missing from this wonderful collection is a bit more context. For if Schwartz’s goal is to preserve Yiddish culture not just for other Borscht Belt Jews but for the world, he needs to provide outsiders with more factual information to ground his creative musings. A thorough introduction might do the trick, as would longer prose transitions between sections. As is, though, this taste of Schwartz’s life is an appetizing one.
The colorful portrait of one slice of American Jewry.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500150761
Page Count: 106
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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