Jerusalem Report contributor Halevy's engrossing account of his tenure among the late Rabbi Meir Kahane's radical right-wing demimonde and his eventual reemergence into respectability. On the surface, this is similar to many experiences of growing up in the 1960s: A young idealist seeks out ever more extreme ways to attract attention to his causes. But Halevy was no Weatherman or Black Panther. He was a member of the Jewish Defense League, subversive defenders of the Jewish people against anti-Semitism. Halevy's story highlights an unusual convergence of historical moments: post-Holocaust America meets the counterculture. He describes with fascinating insight his childhood in Brooklyn's Borough Park, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, as the son of a Holocaust survivor who had lived in a hole in the woods as the rest of his town was sent to the death camps. Halevy's father trained his son to be a survivor as well- -by not conforming, not becoming comfortable among the goyim (non-Jews), by supporting Israel. The young Halevy internalized these lessons. He joined a militant Zionist youth group while still in grade school and began working to free Soviet Jewry when he was 12. He was soon drawn to Kahane's JDL, which was making headlines with its violent guerrilla tactics. A somewhat reluctant follower of the charismatic but insane Kahane, Halevy never participated in terrorist acts; his moment of glory was masterminding a plan to get himself and other Americans arrested in Russia, to bring media attention to the plight of Soviet Jews. When the cause was adopted by the Jewish establishment, Halevy finally liberated himself from both the JDL and his Manichean worldview, getting beyond the Holocaust and on with his life. A profound look at the child of a Holocaust survivor burdened with the knowledge that his very existence is a miracle and the need to prove that the miracle wasn't squandered on him.
Pub Date: Nov. 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-49860-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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