This is a tale of two bubbes, or Jewish grandmothers, two ordinary women who have both arrived at the age of 93, only to be torn between their love of life and their knowledge that death is imminent. Tessie, Horowitz's paternal grandmother, and Pearlie, her maternal bubbe, seem at first like typical, indeed stereotypical, Jewish grandmothers. Alternately cute and irritating, they share homely wisdom and recipes for stuffed cabbage and matzoh balls, and their life stories—from immigrant to young married, working to help support the family, widowhood—are not as original as Horowitz seems to think. But as the narrative progressess, Pearlie's and Tessie's inner strengths emerge, and the very ordinariness of their difficult lives creates a solid link for readers to hold on to. Pearlie has outlived her son, Steve, who died in his 50s of a heart attack (and to whom she continues to write letters). Tessie, too, may outlive her son; Horowitz's father is being treated for mesothelioma, a usually fatal lung cancer. Pearlie still carries the shame of her husband Moe's drinking (``Waves of anger alternate with the impulse to cover up for him,'' Horowitz writes). And Tessie literally held her mother in her own arms when the older women died at home. Despite the joy they take in their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, both women are left wondering why they are still alive when so many whom they have loved are gone. But live they do: Pearlie, until recently, performed with a dancing group called the Dolls; Tessie is a fierce player of gin rummy. Horowitz emphasizes their different personalities: Pearlie is generous in expressing her love of family and of life. Tessie is more stoic; she is stunned when Horowitz says she should tell her ailing son she loves him—she assumes it's understood. In her portraits of these two very human women, Horowitz has written a loving tribute to the power of sheer survival and the wisdom that derives from it.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81395-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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