A compelling, multidimensional look at Judaism and Spain—a land infamous for its medieval anti-Semitism but as yet unheralded as a haven from Hitler. Alexy (a family therapist specializing in art therapy) provides a vivid picture of the painfully complex nature of Spanish-Jewish relations, using oral histories to flush out and flesh out Jewish families, including her own (which had been saved from the Holocaust in Franco's Spain) and those families who have secretly lived as Jewish Catholics or crypto-Jews since the Inquisition of 1492 (the author herself apparently lived much of her life as a Catholic with a disturbingly Jewish background). The oral narratives refer to several cherished but hidden religious symbols, such as ancient Hebrew parchments hidden within Catholic icons (as in the title), in what seems to be art-therapist Alexy's way of exploring a painfully denied Jewish past via tangible symbolism. Throughout much of her text, the author also explores ``the paradox of refugees fleeing the Nazi's Final Solution by seeking asylum in a country where no Jews had been allowed to live openly...for over four centuries.'' While medieval Jew-killing rituals and anti-Jewish stereotypes persisted among Spanish Catholics, these people also produced their own Raoul Wallenbergs who saved ``somewhere around 70,000 Jews'' during the Holocaust. After covering WW II, Alexy moves on to fascinating encounters with crypto-Jews in New Mexico, some of whom describe themselves as ``Jewish-Catholic-Indians.'' The author and several of her subjects, we learn, have found their own painfully submerged identities through pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Toledo, the ``Jerusalem of Spain.'' In this fine complement to Jane Gerber's The Jews of Spain (1992), Alexy guides us through the perilous tension between faith and identity, helping us to understand the complex psychospiritual reverberations of the Spanish Expulsion and Inquisition—still quivering from the aftershocks of 500 years.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-77816-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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