Revealing, if long-winded, examination of contemporary Orthodox Judaism.
Conniving rebbitzin topples a wealthy Jewish community.
Delilah Goldgrab is as acquisitive as they come. As a young girl, she sets her sights on living in a Woodmere Tudor mansion with a large household staff. When she fails to ensnare a wealthy husband from Bernstein Rabbinical College, Delilah settles for the noble dullard, Chaim Levi. Chaim’s grandfather is a prominent Rabbi in the Bronx and heir to a tiny synagogue. When Delilah senses she’s getting locked into a lower-class life, she tramples on Chaim’s unsuspecting congregants and begins her mad grab at affluence. Doltish Chaim refuses to acknowledge Delilah’s sins. Instead, he surrenders to her prodding and applies for a position at the notorious Swallow Lake temple. Swallow Lake’s members are fabulously wealthy and famously divided in their faith. Chaim knows he’s signing on for an impossible task when he accepts the Rabbi position, but he’s helpless. Delilah, now pregnant, calls all the shots in this family. The community quickly sours on Delilah’s lackadaisical piety. Delilah tries to distract her critics by luring a fabulously wealthy Russian Jew and his wife into the fold and succeeds in dismantling the congregation. Ragen (The Covenant, 2004, etc.) does an apt job illustrating the numerous demands upon a rabbi and his wife (the rebbitzin). But she fails to make the job appear to be an unbearable burden—these guys are the equivalent to middle management in a large corporation. The book would be far more entertaining if Delilah possessed admirable traits; alas, she is bland in her depravity. Endowed with blonde hair, a voluptuous figure, the first name of a “wicked whore” and a surname that is synonymous with money grubbing, she does not come across as a morally upstanding member of the shul. For the non-Orthodox crowd, the scandals will seem tame, but the culture exotic. For those enmeshed in Ragen’s culture, this book may stir up some controversy: Have rabbis become too beholden to their benefactors?
Revealing, if long-winded, examination of contemporary Orthodox Judaism.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-35238-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
A sentimental meditation on "[w]hat is false about hope?"
Albom (The Time Keeper, 2012, etc.) goes divine again in a story about love, forgiveness and the hereafter.
Sully Harding’s a disgraced ex-military pilot. Sully hadn’t expected the assignment to ferry a jet cross-country, and so he’d indulged in a drink the night before. Making a stopover to meet his wife, Sully received incorrect instructions from ground control, resulting in a midair collision. There were no serious injuries, but driving to the airport, Sully’s wife was mortally injured in a car crash, hit by the controller attempting to flee his mistake. Flight recording missing and blood alcohol content registered, Sully pled guilty and was sentenced to prison. Depressed after his wife’s death, Sully’s now home in Coldwater, Mich., selling newspaper ads just as Coldwater’s spotlighted in an astounding news story: Residents are receiving phone calls from heaven. Katherine hears from her beloved sister. Tess hears from her mother. Even the police chief hears from his son killed in Afghanistan. The messages are brief and reassuring: "The end is not the end." Angry and bitter, worried about his young son awaiting a call from his dead mother, Sully wants to prove the calls a hoax. The church hierarchy’s befuddled by the apparent miracle, but wise old Pastor Warren’s skeptical. Amy, ambitious small-time television reporter, is reluctant to join the media circus but grows jealous as Oprah-types bask in the hype’s spotlight. Sully himself faces a momentous decision as the phone calls are broadcast worldwide in a television spectacular. Albom’s story is simplistic theology about love’s eternal nature, forgiveness and the afterlife. There’s a hint of romance and some formulaic secondary characters, including the crusty old seen-everything local reporter and the odd, out-of-place funeral director. Framed by short anecdotes relating to Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone, Albom’s story unfolds in reportorial-style sketches, right up to a double-twist conclusion.
A sentimental meditation on "[w]hat is false about hope?"Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-229437-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
"I'm Yakov Fixer... I'm the kind of man who finds it perilous to be alive." He is childless, as the Talmud said, alive but dead, and deserted by his wife. He leaves his native shtetl for Kiev to pass for a few months as a goyim. Then he is arrested for having counterfeited a name and is later accused of killing a child in a ritual murder. This is the Russia of Nicholas the Second, the increasing irrationale of anti-Semitism, the prophetic "stink of future evil"— and there seems to be no question that this is Malamud's strongest book. There may be more question whether Yakov is one of his "saint-schlemiehls." He's a simple man, an ignorant man, but he reads a little (Spinoza) and he thinks. Even in his outraged innocence he knows that he is a "rational being and a man must try to reason." During these long months of interrogation and internment, he develops a certain philosophy of his own even though "it's all skin and bones." But speculate as he does, protest as he does, how accept the fact that he is one of the chosen people, chosen to represent the destiny and racial guilt of the Jews? As a Job, and several of Malamud's earlier characters have been termed Jobs, he repudiates suffering and eventually his hate is stronger than his fear... Anticipating all the inevitable comparisons to which the book is equal, Malamud's Fixer, less ideological than Koestler's Darkness at Noon, less symbolic than Kafka's Trial, has elements of each but a more exposed humanity than either of them. It is a work of commanding power.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1966
ISBN: 1412812585
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1966
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