The celebrated author's post-Holocaust living will. What can Pulitzer Prize-winning Wouk add after thirteen novels, four plays, and more? This valedictory, darker than The Hope (1993), includes various wars and remembrances. When the winds of war settled, the Holocaust and Israel provided Jews with "the energy of guilt and the energy of pride. Both are waning . . . [and Jewry is now] running on empty." The destruction of European Jewry is compared to the epic loss of the Second Temple, and the Rabin assassination put in terms of a biblical analogy. Wouk, noting that the commandant of Auschwitz predicted that Western Jews would assimilate and seal Hitler's victory, worries about Jewry's cultural mutiny. The grandchildren of Marjorie Morningstar are demographic icicles. The hope, if not the glory, of a Jewish future may have to be qualitative rather than quantitative. Wouk, urging cultural survival through cultural literacy, devotes his large central section to a brisk but skillful summary of the Jewish classics: all the books of the Hebrew Bible, plus the talmud, the kabbalah, and Yiddish culture. His anecdotal evidence suggests that even secular Jews might enjoy his daily mental workout on the monkey bars of talmudic law. Wouk sees learning and living by Judaism's classics as Jewry's only hope for living on in the diaspora. Despite his dire predictions, his testament—enlivened by memories of Rabin, Ben-Gurion, Bellow, Agnon, and his family patriarchs—is more optimistic than ominous. The first and perhaps the last learned American-Jewish novelist begins his Afterword, "So my task ends." Like Moses the Lawgiver in his book-length farewell address in Deuteronomy, Wouk at 84 leaves us with a recap of Torah wisdom and the encouragement to choose survival. Here is the lion of Judah in winter.
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019608-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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