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A JEWISH BOYHOOD IN POLAND

REMEMBERING KOLBUSZOWA

Salsitz was born in 1920 in the Polish town of Kolbuszowa, population 4000, half Jewish, half Polish. He would grow up to dismantle, brick by brick, the ghetto where the Nazis herded his community in 1941. Then he escaped into the forest, the Polish army, and, later, the US. This memoir, written by Skolnik (History/CUNY; Money Talks, 1986) on the basis of taped interviews, recalls the life of the town in the 1920's and 30's. There's too much about the economics of rural Poland and not enough about Salsitz's mother and sisters—but Salsitz does serve up enough wonderful stories about tensions between Poles and Jews, Zionists and Orthodox, God and man (and even sometimes woman) to earn this book a place on the shelf with Isaac Bashevis Singer and Isaac Babel. Salsitz's anti-Semitic public-school teacher, for example, invited the author to sing a solo on Marshal Pilsudski's saint day. The Hasidic child arrived at the recital and found that a screen would hide him from view of the audience, who might find his long coat and curls offensive. A local rebbe claimed that when the Messiah returned he would make Kolbuszowa one of his first stops: Salsitz's accounts of activist piety and charity make it plausible. The local scribe, when copying the Torah, plunged into the ritual bath to purify himself before each writing of God's name, sometimes taking several baths per sentence. The community not only provided for the indigent but organized to spare beggars the embarrassment of waiting on line for handouts. Chapters on America and Palestine, the two dream destinations that had already drawn many from the town, suggest the centrifugal forces—Zionism and modern prosperity—that might have dissolved the tight little community within a generation. A final chapter tells how it was destroyed instead, within months of the Nazi invasion: bitter stories, briefly and forcefully told. On special occasions, the Jews of Kolbuszowa purified themselves in a bath set deep in the earth, with freezing water. Reading this memoir is a bit like that—you come out shivering but cleansed. (Thirty-four photographs.)

Pub Date: April 27, 1992

ISBN: 0-8156-0262-6

Page Count: 312

Publisher: Syracuse Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992

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THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955

ISBN: 0679733736

Page Count: 228

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955

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