A creative, unusual mix of memoir and travel narrative.
Canadian playwright and poet Garfinkel (Glass Psalms, 2005, etc.) considers the quandary of Zionism in this account of his travels in Israel and Palestine.
Planning a trip to Israel with his devout Jewish girlfriend, the author happened to meet a Palestinian immigrant whose descriptions of her harsh life in Jerusalem contradicted the rosy pictures painted by his teachers at Bialik Hebrew Day School. But she also told him of a house in Jerusalem shared by its original Palestinian owner and a Jewish couple who moved in after the Six Day War. The house suggested a model for coexistence to Garfinkel, who decided to write a play about it and headed for Israel alone; he felt he needed to find out the truth about the occupation for himself. That journey permanently changed his relationship to his religion and his past. Describing his two trips to the Holy Land in the mid-’90s, the author provides a stirring portrait of day-to-day life in modern Jerusalem. Garfinkel’s courage and curiosity led him far beyond the typical tourist’s itinerary, into adventures as exciting and heartbreaking as anything found in a work of fiction. Crossing back and forth through the checkpoints, he witnessed suffering, violence and acrimony intermixed with fierce friendship, generosity and the widespread thirst for normalcy. Intense ambivalence suffuses this aptly titled book. Garfinkel exhibits genuine respect for both sides of the conflict, but resists simplifying the notoriously intricate matrix of religion, property rights, violence and conflicting views of history that he encountered. Forced by his experiences to modify long-held beliefs about the Jewish state, he writes honestly and humorously about his ignorance, prejudices and discoveries. He effectively weaves in lively flashbacks starring the ever-present specter of Mrs. Blintzkrieg, the fieriest of Bialik Hebrew Day’s Zionist teachers. Garfinkel’s abilities as a playwright enrich the text, which is studded with brief, dramatic scenes distilling the emotional essence of each encounter or relationship.
A creative, unusual mix of memoir and travel narrative.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06674-6
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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
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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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