A superb read about the sufferings of a crypto-Jewish matriarch in the 17th century.
This saga of crypto-Jews (conversos) during the Inquisition in Mexico holds lessons and warnings for all.
Fine (Paris Lamb, 2015, etc.) begins her story in Mexico City in 1650, when Clara, the matriarch of the Crespin clan, is arrested and taken to the prison of the Inquisitors, where she will be held for five awful years. The tale is told alternately through the eyes of Clara and her granddaughter, Celendaria, conversos who secretly maintain Jewish traditions after becoming Christians. Clara was betrayed, but by whom? Celendaria’s father grieves (“Why do they persecute us? We follow their rules, worship their Savior, tithe at the cathedral. What do they want?”). This venal Inquisition encourages bribes, which, though usually ineffective, drain the Crespins, affluent merchants, dry. The years drag on. Celendaria becomes a woman and is betrothed to Francisco de Mendoza Rebozo. She also spies Father Miguel Lopez, a converso—or is he a true believer now?—making love to Mariel Behar in the confessional. But the Crespins and the Behars have had enough. After the wedding of Celendaria and heroic Francisco, family members plot their escape to the north. Even rumors of savage Native Americans are no match for the terrors of the Inquisition. Once again, like in the biblical Exodus, these Jews wish to escape oppression and seek freedom. Fine writes well, bringing the Crespins alive in speech and circumstance that reflect their social status as proudly prosperous (At one point, Celendaria’s mother asserts: “We must be resilient and survive as our forefathers did when they were driven from our ancient lands in Israel, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Peru”). Surely the Inquisitors are among the greatest villains in history, second only, for Jews, to Hitler. But then readers will likely realize that in the best interpretation of this horror, the Inquisitors felt that they were doing God’s will, which should give everyone pause. Fine is a serious scholar of the persecution of Sephardic Jews, and the details in this book are impressive and edifying.
A superb read about the sufferings of a crypto-Jewish matriarch in the 17th century.Pub Date: March 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9826952-5-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: L'Image Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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