A pleasant collection of honest, critically discriminating encounters with the Jewish faith and culture.
Men’s Journal articles editor Ross embarks on a sampling mission of Jewish experiences.
Born to Jewish parents, when the author was 9 years old, he moved with his mother, divorced and with a failed medical practice in New York City, to Mississippi. Fearing the repercussions of professing their religion in that place at that time, and not altogether comfortable with Judaism in general, she told her children to say they were Unitarians, and little of real Jewishness touched their lives. Time passed, and Ross wanted to know more about his Jewish identity. “The result has been a furtive fascination with Judaism,” he writes, “one that compels and repels in equal measure.” That ambivalence serves him well as he investigates some of the more eccentric strains of Judaism to see if they speak to him of his Jewish identity. Ross’ voice is both questioning and questing, the passion tamped but alight, and a few communities were seemingly amenable to his way in the world: Reboot, “the Jewish illuminati,” were obvious candidates, but the author wondered about their distinctive efficacy regarding identity, and a Classical Reform Congregation was enticing—liberal, principled, rooted, free of stereotypes—but its cult of synthesis interweaving Judaism and Americanism felt muddled. Ross is a fine practitioner of the kaleidoscopic research approach, but for clear reasons he was not going to join Hasidic, ultra-Orthodox or Crypto-Jewish groups. His lack of faith did not deter him, and he found meaning in contemporary Judaism’s “iconoclasm, abstract monotheism, and social justice,” and its undetectable Supreme Being.
A pleasant collection of honest, critically discriminating encounters with the Jewish faith and culture.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59463-095-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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