A deeply affecting story of three people’s intense religious journeys: from Judaism to Roman Catholicism on the part of the author’s parents, and the reverse for Dubner himself. A writer and editor at the New York Times Magazine, Dubner traces the loneliness, loss, and estrangement that led his parents away from their second-generation inner-city Judaism to a particularly fervent Catholicism—and thus toward each other—in the years during and following WWII. Florence and Solomon Dubner raised the author and his seven siblings in near-poverty, but with much happy familial cohesiveness, on a small farm in upstate New York. There, “the Dubners lived in the District of Devotion that bordered on Fanatical.” Although Solomon’s father broke with him completely after his baptism, neither of Dubner’s parents had second thoughts about their conversion (although Sol in particular had some vestigial Jewish traits, including a love for gefilte fish and a penchant for singing “My Yiddishe Mama—). That their son reapproached and ultimately converted back to Judaism might be credited to “the cunning of history,— although Dubner’s encounters with an outspoken Jewish drama teacher and a close associate of the Lubavitcher Rebbe played a role. The latter part of Dubner’s memoir portrays his own journey as well as his investigations of who his father really was and why he might have converted, in addition to a genesis of the Dubner family tree (leading to a trip to Poland) and an account of his protracted attempts to get his mother to accord Judaism a measure of theological validity. Dubner writes reflectively and nontriumphantly of his own struggles to feel comfortable as a Jew and to resist the kind of religious absolutism and chauvinism that, as a adolescent and young adult, “nearly suffocated— him. His engrossing book will interest not only serious Jews and Catholics, but all whose lives have been torn by intrafamilial religions schisms. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15180-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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