An intricate genealogy of a family of Sephardic Jews and their slaves who branched out from Barbados to embrace new opportunities in the early American republic.
In her latest deep excavation of Jewish history, Leibman—a professor of English and humanities at Reed College and winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism (2012)—focuses on two children of Abraham Rodrigues Brandon, a prominent member of his Bridgetown synagogue who, during the early 19th century, became “the island’s wealthiest Jew.” Abraham’s concubine, Sarah Esther Lopez-Gill, who became the mother of his children, Sarah and Isaac, was an African woman enslaved in the neighboring household of the Lopez family, a branch of the Sephardic immigrants who came to Barbados after expulsion from Spain. Sarah and Isaac were both born as slaves and were christened. In 1801, upon the death of their grandfather, who left them an inheritance, they were able to buy their freedom and live in his house. Such circumstances were hardly the norm. “For enslaved people, the death of owners and white kin was an anxious business,” writes the author. “One cross word, and lives could be ruined. Whites were often unpredictable in their affections.” From this time, Leibman follows Sarah and Isaac through their lives, first to Suriname, where Isaac was circumcised and they became “nação, Jews of the Portuguese nation.” Sarah was sent to be schooled in London, and she eventually married New York merchant Joshua Moses. “Their romance,” writes Leibman, “would spawn a new dynasty.” Isaac also journeyed out of the Caribbean, and the ensuing tangle of genealogy is both telling and mystifying, as the family struggled, fought for civil rights, and joined the thriving Jewish communities in New York and Philadelphia, leaving a lasting legacy. The author includes relevant artifacts, such as photos of the intertwined families.
A richly contextual history of multiracial Jews and their travails and triumphs in the New World.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-753047-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Categories: HISTORY | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | JEWISH | WORLD | ETHNICITY & RACE | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
