The emotional autobiography of a woman whose religious odyssey begins in Orthodox Judaism and ends in Roman Catholicism. What sets this apart from other conversion accounts is that Bruder (Going to Jerusalem, 1979) never rejects her heritage. She believes that ``God is present equally in Torah scroll and consecrated wafer.'' Nor does she argue that God wants all Jews to convert; her story applies to herself alone. It begins in Brooklyn, with a childhood dominated by a glum mother, a remote father, and by the strictness—especially toward women—of Orthodox Judaism. Joy comes with the great Shabbat celebrations, but God remains a distant, unknown figure. In time, Bruder grows up, marries, adopts a child, works for a doctorate. Then one day, stopped in her car at a red light, God speaks to her: ``I will be with you always,'' He says. From now on, Bruder becomes a religious seeker. She pores over the Bible, talks to rabbis, discovers Buddhism. Then life unravels: A novel goes nowhere, her academic career collapses. At wits' end, Bruder—in almost classic 12-step fashion—admits her inadequacy and surrenders to her fate (``This was the thing itself, bitter cup to the dregs''). A loving presence appears, a matron dressed in black, possibly the Virgin Mary (Bruder remains uncertain). The author discovers prayer. Once again, God addresses her, in Hebrew this time: ``Lech lecha'' (``get up and go out''). Bruder does, to Mass, and becomes a Catholic, receiving ``God's unconditional love and forgiveness.'' The onslaught of personal crises may grate on readers' nerves. So may Bruder's writerly tics, which include verbless sentences galore and enough one-sentence paragraphs (in one stretch, 14 in a row) to put Kurt Vonnegut to shame. But her singular conversion is memorable, as is her vivid description of Jewish Orthodoxy in all its severity and majesty.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-46874-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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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