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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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