An accomplished piece of research shared in a delightfully readable way.
When is a knish more than just a knish? When it is the repository of more than a century of Jewish immigrant culture.
Silver’s debut nonfiction book is itself like a knish—deceptively simple. A knish is a pastry stuffed with potatoes, kasha, vegetables, cottage cheese, jam or anything really; truth be told, if you can name it, it’s probably been stuffed into a knish. On the surface, it’s heavy peasant food—carbs, often plus more carbs—but the artistry that goes into rolling out the thin dough and flavoring the filling is considerable. Similarly, Silver’s single-subject work of social history has been shaped with skill and nuance and—to continue chewing on the metaphor—seasoned with sharp humor and deep affection, not just for the pastry but for all the people whose lives it has touched. Silver starts with two memories: one of standing in the Polish town of Knyszen, where she had gone in search of the pastry’s roots; the other of the ritual meals of knishes she enjoyed with her Brooklyn-born grandmother. Though the knish arrived in the New World with Jewish immigrants, America is its homeland now, as it is nearly forgotten in Eastern Europe and barely recognized in Israel. Silver then introduces the pantheon of American knish makers, most of them gone today: Mrs. Stahl’s, Gabila’s, Schatzkin’s and others. Her loving, detailed portraits are bolstered by deep historical understanding. After the impressive beginning, the subsequent chapter “In Search of the First Knish” is rather thin and unsatisfying, as it winds haphazardly through Poland and Israel, Internet searches, and an interview or two. But Silver returns to surer ground as she explores pop culture and visits devoted knish makers in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her voice is energetic and deeply personal, and she’s unafraid of puns or a Yiddish turn of phrase; occasionally, that means cleverness trumps clarity and historical details get lost in showy storytelling tropes, but her enthusiasm and knowledge still carry readers along.
An accomplished piece of research shared in a delightfully readable way.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61168-312-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Brandeis Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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