An uneven but candid testament of two men passionately trying to revive and reimagine Judaism.
A convert to Judaism was deeply influenced by a prolific Jewish intellectual.
Melding biography and memoir, National Jewish Book Award winner Prochnik (The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, 2014, etc.) examines the life and work of Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), philological archaeologist of the mystical roots of Judaism. For Prochnik, Scholem “loomed as a kind of prophet,” offering “something closer to revelation than anything I could discover in normative Judaism.” Indeed, normative Judaism—to which Prochnik converted in his 20s—failed him just as it had failed Scholem. Growing up in a bourgeois, assimilated German family, Scholem became a Zionist at the age of 11, vowing to go to Palestine, and by his teens, he became obsessed with cabala, a network of “widely diversified and often contradictory” texts. At the age of 17, he met Walter Benjamin, beginning an intense, sometimes-difficult friendship based on common passions. Prochnik traces the evolution of Scholem’s parsing of “the underlying cosmological principles” of cabala, “its metaphysics.” Although Prochnik faithfully and respectfully offers a detailed examination of these metaphysical works, they remain abstract and paradoxical; many who knew Scholem concluded that he “was just a maze of contradictions.” Readers are likely to agree. In contrast, Prochnik vividly renders his own journey to define his relationship to Judaism, which took him and his wife to Jerusalem in search of a spiritual home. They were following Scholem’s path to find “some more galvanizing external form of Judaism” than what they found in America, something “higher and purer.” As they settled into Israeli culture, however, they found increasing consumerism, turbulent politics, violence that included the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and the election of right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, and strife and oppression among Palestinians that they struggled to fully understand. Frustrated, unable to make a living, the family decided to return to the U.S., where the marriage finally unraveled and where Prochnik’s commitment to both Zionism and Judaism floundered.
An uneven but candid testament of two men passionately trying to revive and reimagine Judaism.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59051-776-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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