Earnestly portrays the push and pull between family history and personal growth.
Frank, spirited memoir of identity from a Brooklyn-raised, Egyptian-born Jewish feminist.
“What kind of a Jew are you?” was the question that plagued Zonana (English and Women’s Studies/Borough of Manhattan Community Coll.) as a girl. Her parents were little help. French-speaking Sephardic Jews from Cairo, they appeared, she writes, to suffer from “an involuntary—or is it willed?—failure to recollect.” Even more confusing were the stark differences between the young Zonana and her classmates and neighbors, Jewish families from Eastern Europe who kept kosher homes and ate food completely foreign to an Egyptian-ruled kitchen. Instead of kishke, the Zonanas ate tabbouleh; instead of stuffed cabbage, they devoured stuffed grape leaves and ful medammes (fava beans marinated in lemon juice, garlic and oil). In fact, it was through food that the author began to explore cultural differences, later learning her mother’s recipes (some of which are included in the book). Two journeys helped her uncover her roots. As a girl, she traveled to Brazil, where a large, close-knit brood of relatives had emigrated, and discovered the kind of “tribal life” that she would have experienced had conflict not uprooted her family. Then, 50 years after leaving as a young child, she traveled to Cairo, despite the protests of her family, and was embraced with open arms by both Egyptian Arabs and the few remaining Egyptian Jews. The highlight of this pilgrimage was Zonana’s discovery of the rundown Rambam synagogue. Overcome with emotion, she wept at its broken, locked gates, but her encounter with this place of healing and worship brought her own identity into sharper focus. The story of her cathartic quest is intertwined with family history and the author’s personal voyage through grad school, teaching positions in Oklahoma and New Orleans and finally her flight from Hurricane Katrina.
Earnestly portrays the push and pull between family history and personal growth.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55861-574-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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