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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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