Earnestly portrays the push and pull between family history and personal growth.
Frank, spirited memoir of identity from a Brooklyn-raised, Egyptian-born Jewish feminist.
“What kind of a Jew are you?” was the question that plagued Zonana (English and Women’s Studies/Borough of Manhattan Community Coll.) as a girl. Her parents were little help. French-speaking Sephardic Jews from Cairo, they appeared, she writes, to suffer from “an involuntary—or is it willed?—failure to recollect.” Even more confusing were the stark differences between the young Zonana and her classmates and neighbors, Jewish families from Eastern Europe who kept kosher homes and ate food completely foreign to an Egyptian-ruled kitchen. Instead of kishke, the Zonanas ate tabbouleh; instead of stuffed cabbage, they devoured stuffed grape leaves and ful medammes (fava beans marinated in lemon juice, garlic and oil). In fact, it was through food that the author began to explore cultural differences, later learning her mother’s recipes (some of which are included in the book). Two journeys helped her uncover her roots. As a girl, she traveled to Brazil, where a large, close-knit brood of relatives had emigrated, and discovered the kind of “tribal life” that she would have experienced had conflict not uprooted her family. Then, 50 years after leaving as a young child, she traveled to Cairo, despite the protests of her family, and was embraced with open arms by both Egyptian Arabs and the few remaining Egyptian Jews. The highlight of this pilgrimage was Zonana’s discovery of the rundown Rambam synagogue. Overcome with emotion, she wept at its broken, locked gates, but her encounter with this place of healing and worship brought her own identity into sharper focus. The story of her cathartic quest is intertwined with family history and the author’s personal voyage through grad school, teaching positions in Oklahoma and New Orleans and finally her flight from Hurricane Katrina.
Earnestly portrays the push and pull between family history and personal growth.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55861-574-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
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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