Two brothers—one a family therapist (Howard), the other head of the Center for Jewish Renewal in Philadelphia and author of These Holy Sparks, 1983, etc. (Arthur)—come to terms with their past and present relationship. Despite a loving mother's constant plea to ``be close to your brother above all!,'' the Waskows have felt overriding anger and resentment toward each other throughout most of their lives. The early chapters here—told in the authors' alternating voices- -reconstruct childhood memories. While Howard devotes his boyhood Saturdays to playing sports, Arthur, always the outsider, passes his at the local library, ``disconnected from other people''; also painstakingly recalled are the boys' vibrant mother, Honey—who spends much of their youth fighting tuberculosis—and their infrequent trips to the local Orthodox synagogue. We're offered intimate, poignant glimpses of family tragedies—ranging from life- threatening illnesses to a suicide—but there's an inexplicable void regarding the brothers' wives, divorces, and children. At the nadir of their relationship, Howard once retaliates with, ``I really may have to kill you some day after all.'' But only a few years later, at midlife, the Waskows' relationship turns on the family's wrenching decision not to prolong Honey's life on a respirator—a crisis that forges a new bond between the brothers. Particularly interesting here are the Waskows' divergent responses to Judaism. Neither brother seems to have come to terms with the other's approach: To Howard, Judaism is an avoidable burden; to Arthur, it's a life-affirming force. When Howard remarries, the only Jewish reference at his wedding is a prayer devised by Arthur in their mother's memory. Arthur suggests that Howard's Judaism is limited to nostalgia, but Howard protests that his wedding banquet is richly Jewish, ``overspilled with whitefish, chopped liver...knishes, kishke, and challah.'' To the now mature Arthur, a leading figure in American Jewish renewal, this response is theologically bankrupt but no longer a personal insult. Despite enduring differences, the Waskows offer an appealing human drama in writing themselves back to fraternity.
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-933997-9
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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