An emotionally wrenching account of the battle between wounded reticence and a desire for truth.
A Jewish ghostwriter for Holocaust survivors becomes haunted by her mother’s silence regarding her own family’s experiences during World War II in this novel.
Isabel Toledo grew up in New York City but relocated to Israel, chasing her obsession with providing written testimony on the behalf of survivors of the horrors of the Holocaust. She’s been at this work for 20 years, relentlessly tackling the tempests of the past. But she’s become cumulatively depleted and is encouraged by many to give up what her mother, Suri, calls a “morbid preoccupation.” Yet she can’t let go: “Twenty years of slipping into survivors’ lives, a warm body between cold sheets, was taking its toll on her. And that mortified her. How dare she complain of hardship?” What Isabel really pines for is to unlock Suri’s “badly sealed pain.” Suri never discusses her experiences during the war, though Isabel has managed to cull meager scraps of information. Suri’s mother, Bella, died in Ukraine while Suri survived somewhere in Siberia. For Isabel, a professional archaeologist of buried secrets, her mother’s silence is profoundly exasperating. David, her often absentee father, has been dead for years and was also intensely private, a historical abyss as well. Meanwhile, Isabel turns to sex to “ground down the pain” of her family’s inadequacies, in particular her mother’s “detachment.” Isabel has an “official boyfriend,” Emanuel, though their relationship has grown stagnant, and two younger paramours on the side. But even her sex life is tinged with the darkness of her monomaniacal interest in the Holocaust, with her predilections depicted with unsettling artistry by Sivan (SNAFU and Other Stories, 2014). The author deftly conjures an atmosphere of formidable inscrutability—Suri’s pain is all the more palpable since it’s unshared. The author’s story is crackling with authentic life—her characters are full and deep, brimming with pathos and eccentricity. And while the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust is well-traversed terrain, Sivan forges a refreshingly original path of her own.
An emotionally wrenching account of the battle between wounded reticence and a desire for truth.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944453-08-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Cuidono Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
This first novel, ostensibly about the friendship between two boys, Reuven and Danny, from the time when they are fourteen on opposing yeshiva ball clubs, is actually a gently didactic differentiation between two aspects of the Jewish faith, the Hasidic and the Orthodox. Primarily the Hasidic, the little known mystics with their beards, earlocks and stringently reclusive way of life. According to Reuven's father who is a Zionist, an activist, they are fanatics; according to Danny's, other Jews are apostates and Zionists "goyim." The schisms here are reflected through discussions, between fathers and sons, and through the separation imposed on the two boys for two years which still does not affect their lasting friendship or enduring hopes: Danny goes on to become a psychiatrist refusing his inherited position of "tzaddik"; Reuven a rabbi.... The explanation, in fact exegesis, of Jewish culture and learning, of the special dedication of the Hasidic with its emphasis on mind and soul, is done in sufficiently facile form to engage one's interest and sentiment. The publishers however see a much wider audience for The Chosen. If they "rub their tzitzis for good luck,"—perhaps—although we doubt it.
Pub Date: April 28, 1967
ISBN: 0449911543
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
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