Delightful: rich in its characters, vivid in its setting, and genuinely intriguing overall.
A rich historical from Sherwood (Green, 1995; Vindication, 1993) about 17th-century Prague’s Rabbi Loew, his Golem, some English alchemists, and an obsessed Habsburg emperor.
Many know the story of Rabbi Loew, the saintly, erudite tzaddik (holy man) who made a giant out of mud and breathed life into him. Loew is indeed one of Sherwood’s characters here, but the real protagonist is Rochel, a Jewish seamstress who marries the kindly but dull cobbler Zev because, since she’s of illegitimate birth, no one else will have her. Rochel is one of the best tailors in Europe, and her skill in making clothes for the gentry and courtiers of Hradcany Castle brings her to the attention of Emperor Rudolph II. A vain hypochondriac, Rudolph has heard about two shady English alchemists (John Dee and Edward Kelly) whom he believes have discovered the elixir of immortality, so he brings them to Prague and orders them to produce it for him. Charlatans or not, Kelly and Dee are in a no-win situation: If they fail to create the elixir, Rudolph will have them executed for fraud—but if they succeed, he will put them to death to keep them from revealing the secret to others. Meanwhile, civil unrest is brought about by the rise of Protestantism and threats of Ottoman invasion, giving rise to new resentment against the Jews. So Rabbi Loew creates his Golem, named Yossel, to defend the inhabitants of the Judenstadt ghetto. Naturally, word of Yossel’s exploits (he saves Rochel from drowning, for a start) reaches the emperor, who tries to bring the rabbi into his immortality project. Loew knows it’s always best to keep a good distance from the throne, but he also knows how to bargain—his knowledge in exchange for protection of the Jews. A deal with the devil? Read and see.
Delightful: rich in its characters, vivid in its setting, and genuinely intriguing overall.Pub Date: July 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-02138-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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