Warm and spiritually engaging.
A rabbi’s account of how she helped her two adopted sons from Ethiopia assimilate Jewish cultural traditions and blend into her family.
Silverman (co-author: Jewish Family and Life: Traditions, Holidays, and Values for Today's Parents and Children, 1997) grew up with nonpracticing Jewish parents who, through divorce and remarriage, eventually evolved into a “sprawling, unconventional, and finally happy family.” When she started her own family after college, it was with a devoutly Jewish man who actively supported political causes and inspired her to learn more about her cultural and religious traditions. After going “from zero to two children within two years” and writing a book about the “organic relationship between Jewish life and progressive, activist values,” she decided to live out her most cherished dream of adopting a child from abroad. She and her husband registered with an adoption agency and allowed their faith to guide them to the two boys they adopted from Ethiopia, a country with historical ties to Judaism. The sense of fulfillment she experienced was profound. So was the frustration at being unable to give her adopted children more than a “messy mosaic” of family stories within “the unwieldy unfolding narrative of Jewish people” upon which to construct their identities and lives. When her first adopted son, Adari, began to express his unhappiness at being unable to live in a “brown family,” Silverman saw just how far the lived reality of blended family life was from her Edenic visions. Yet for all its imperfections, which she and her husband embraced with open arms, she also realized what a miracle her family was. In a book rich in understanding and humor, the author chronicles her quest to bring herself and her family closer to God. She also meditates on what it means to live as a broken being in a beautifully imperfect world.
Warm and spiritually engaging.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-306-82461-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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