Sure to delight all those Singer fans—especially those who feared that a fifth posthumous collection would never hit the...
Enchanting sketches of a lost world.
This collection picks up on Singer’s earlier volume (In My Father’s Court, not reviewed), offering sketches of the Warsaw rabbinical court over which Singer’s father presided. The vignettes were originally published in Yiddish in the Daily Forward, and this marks their first English publication. Packed with delightful characters (from Chaim the locksmith—who was really a plumber—to the butcher’s wife), this is more than just a collection of eccentric snapshots. The essays also contain the small gems of insight that have so distinguished Singer’s novels. In “A Hasidic Rebbe on the Street,” the author explores the drive to assimilate, while “The Tinsmith and the Housemaid” argues that “Our inner attitude and our outer circumstances are closely bound together.” Marriage preoccupies Singer: he remembers a traveling salesman he knew, and tries to figure out why the man was so blasé about being away from his family. He recalls Friedele, married to the “irascible” Yechiel, and wonders if she is destined—as an old Jewish folktale suggests—to spend the afterlife as his footstool. In “An Unusual Wedding,” a Jewish artisan comes before Singer’s father to marry a prostitute. Readers also see a slice of the author’s family life: in “The Gift,” a woman who appeared before Singer’s father to have a dispute settled tries to give little Isaac a coin, but his father forbids her (saying he will just buy candy and ruin his teeth). Isaac is devastated, and thus comes to learn a little about the pain and humiliation that all of humanity endure on a daily basis.
Sure to delight all those Singer fans—especially those who feared that a fifth posthumous collection would never hit the shelves.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-21343-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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