An uneven but candid testament of two men passionately trying to revive and reimagine Judaism.
A convert to Judaism was deeply influenced by a prolific Jewish intellectual.
Melding biography and memoir, National Jewish Book Award winner Prochnik (The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, 2014, etc.) examines the life and work of Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), philological archaeologist of the mystical roots of Judaism. For Prochnik, Scholem “loomed as a kind of prophet,” offering “something closer to revelation than anything I could discover in normative Judaism.” Indeed, normative Judaism—to which Prochnik converted in his 20s—failed him just as it had failed Scholem. Growing up in a bourgeois, assimilated German family, Scholem became a Zionist at the age of 11, vowing to go to Palestine, and by his teens, he became obsessed with cabala, a network of “widely diversified and often contradictory” texts. At the age of 17, he met Walter Benjamin, beginning an intense, sometimes-difficult friendship based on common passions. Prochnik traces the evolution of Scholem’s parsing of “the underlying cosmological principles” of cabala, “its metaphysics.” Although Prochnik faithfully and respectfully offers a detailed examination of these metaphysical works, they remain abstract and paradoxical; many who knew Scholem concluded that he “was just a maze of contradictions.” Readers are likely to agree. In contrast, Prochnik vividly renders his own journey to define his relationship to Judaism, which took him and his wife to Jerusalem in search of a spiritual home. They were following Scholem’s path to find “some more galvanizing external form of Judaism” than what they found in America, something “higher and purer.” As they settled into Israeli culture, however, they found increasing consumerism, turbulent politics, violence that included the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and the election of right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, and strife and oppression among Palestinians that they struggled to fully understand. Frustrated, unable to make a living, the family decided to return to the U.S., where the marriage finally unraveled and where Prochnik’s commitment to both Zionism and Judaism floundered.
An uneven but candid testament of two men passionately trying to revive and reimagine Judaism.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59051-776-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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