The legendary actor’s juicy memoirs, nicely fleshed out with his granddaughter Rosenfeld’s explanatory commentary. Jacob Adler (1855—1926) was Yiddish theater’s greatest star, first in London and then in America, where his towering portrayals of Shylock and King Lear (transformed by Jacob Gordin’s adaptation into a Jewish merchant prince) won the praise of uptown gentile critics as well as the Lower East Side audiences who worshiped him. Modern-day readers may at first be disappointed that this memoir, the bulk of which was originally published in a New York Yiddish newspaper from 1916 to 1919, deals more with his apprentice years in Russia than his triumphs after fleeing its anti-Jewish laws in 1883. Most will soon be won over, however, by his warts-and-all depiction of the Yiddish theater’s birth (in the fourth quarter of the 19th century) as a decidedly low art form composed primarily of vulgar comedy and light music. Odessa-born Adler was a wild youth, the despair of his pious parents, who fit in easily among the drifters, hard-livers, and near-charlatans who pioneered Yiddish theater. His chronicle of their picaresque journeys and cutthroat competitiveness is vivid, amusing, and oh-so-Russian: on one page Adler swears undying enmity for the producer who “betrays” him; on the next, they fall into each others” arms as the tears and vodka flow freely. Factual information is in scant supply—Adler can—t even state his age consistently—but the incomparable evocation of place and atmosphere more than compensates. Translator and editor Rosenfeld provides the necessary historical background in commentaries that become longer (and more intrusive) in the memoir’s sketchier late chapters, which appeared in 1925 after Adler had suffered a stroke. Nonetheless, they too contain some wonderful material about his most famous roles, and Rosenfeld’s interpolations about the maturing of Yiddish theater into a more serious art (for which Adler was largely responsible) are lucid and informative. A wonderful treat for theater lovers—and for anyone who likes real-life intrigue and emotion rendered with Dostoevskian intensity. (50 photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-41351-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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