A poignant and life-affirming family memoir.
A James Beard Award–winning food blogger’s account of growing up in a family with conflicting attitudes toward Judaism.
Though Jewish by culture, Altman’s (Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, 2013) parents never pushed her to explore the religion. Her stylish mother scoffed at Talmudic teachings she believed were “designed for people living five thousand years before Pucci and Ella Fitzgerald.” But her advertising executive father, the son of an abusive “fire-and-brimstone Orthodox cantor,” had a far more complex relationship to Judaism. Though apparently uninterested in the Jewish religion, he still emanated a “primal yearning for spiritual connection.” Feeling left out of the rituals that marked the lives of her more devout friends, Altman decided that she wanted to attend Hebrew school, where she felt the first stirrings of lesbian desire for a beautiful teacher. Meanwhile, her parents’ difficult marriage foundered and failed. Her father returned temporarily to his mother’s apartment, the very place he had sought to escape as a young man. By contrast, the apartment became a haven for Altman, whose grandmother joyfully cooked meals for her there. Years later, when her own life fell apart, the author returned to her grandmother’s home, which her father told her was the place she would “bring my husband and raise my children.” While she cooked meals that healed her soul and brought her closer to her beloved grandmother, she finally learned to embrace her homosexuality. Eventually, she married a Catholic woman she loved with—to her surprise—her father’s approval. Like him, she was treyf—imperfect and rule-breaking—and in that commonality, the two finally bonded. In this richly textured narrative, Altman not only reveals how she learned to interweave the contradictory threads of her life into a complex whole. She also gives eloquent voice to the universal human desire to belong.
A poignant and life-affirming family memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-425-27781-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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 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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