3 comments about 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile (Jewish Latin America Series).

1. Part picaresque novel, part moving romance, part historical document, this extraordinary reconstruction of fifteenth-century Spain, by one of Mexico's leading literary figures, has been acclaimed throughout Europe and Latin America. This was the century that changed the face of Spain, and of the world-the century of the wars with the Moors, which led to the end of Moorish Spain; the voyages of discovery, which culminated in Columbus's enterprise; and, perhaps above all, the century of the Inquisition, which financed both the wars and the voyages by seizing the fortunes of condemned Jews, and which led inexorably to the Expulsion. Here these events are seen through the eyes of one Juan Cabezon, a descendant of converted Jews, who is orphaned at an early age by a series of bizarre accidents and taken in hand by Pero Menique, a clever blind man, who uses him as a guide through the rich street life of Castil. It is Menique who brings him beautiful young Isabel de la Vega, sentenced to death by the Inquisition, and begs him to hide her in his house Juan and Isabel fall in love, but as time passes, Isabel is driven close to madness by her forced seclusion in Juan's house and her constant fear of death. One day she vanishes, and Juan sets off on a desperate search for her which takes him across Spain, into the heart of the Jewish communities, and constantly into the path of the Inquisition's autos-da-fea journey that stamps itself indelibly on the reader's mind.

   About the Author: Homero Aridjis is one of Mexico's foremost poets and novelists. He has published more than twenty books of poetry and prose and won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for best book of the year in 1964 and the 1988 Diana. Novedades Literary Prize for the outstanding novel in Spanish for the sequel to 1492, Alemorias del fluevo mundo. Two volumes of his poetry have been published in English, Blue Spaces and Exaltation of Light, as well as a novel, Persephon. Twice the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Indiana. He has been Mexican Ambassador to the Netherlands and Switzerland and is the president of the Group of 100, Mexico's leading environmental organization. He lives in Mexico City.




2. This book is truly great literature. I read it a couple of years ago and have since given it as a gift to several of my friends who appreciate the art of fine writing. In my view, this author uses perfectly chosen words to weave a vividly colored tapestry of life in Spain in 1492.
   
   Despite expectations the title might evoke, this book has essentially nothing to do with Columbus. Nor is it a historical novel in the sense of illustrating a chronology of notable events. Rather, the story is populated with ordinary people attempting to cope with life during the religious upheavals of the time. As such and given the superb word craft, this story provides an opportunity to actually feel what it must have been like to live in those times.



3. I like history, but I just started 1492 and will never finish it.
   This is really really, I mean this is really b o r i n g.

3 comments about The Gi's Rabbi: World War II Letters Of David Max Eichhorn (Modern War Studies).

1. This book captures an individual perspective of World War II from someone who was intimately involved. It provides glimpses that historians and even many of the contemporary books did not. It's also an easy book to read -- like reading letters from your family, only these letters are not just about personal matters but about matters of general interest and international importance. A good book to read, no matter what your age, especially in these times.



2. "The GI's Rabbi: World War II Letters of David Max Eichhorn" is edited by Greg Palmer and Mark S. Zaid, and includes an introduction by Doris L. Bergen. The book brings together not just his letters, but also other documents that illuminate the wartime career of Rabbi Eichhorn, who served as a chaplain in the U.S. Army. His service included time in the European combat zone.
   
   Other texts interspersed among the rabbi's letters are excerpts from his 1969 unpublished autobiography, as well as letters he received from family, friends, and colleagues. Altogether these texts create a vivid portrait of his travels and service. Also included in the book are photos that span the rabbi's entire life, including his wartime service; a glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew words and phrases he uses in his letters; an index; and an epilogue by coeditor Zaid, who is also the rabbi's grandson.
   
   The letters and other texts cover the rabbi's travels in France and Germany, his encounters with important military leaders, and the living conditions he experienced in wartime. The book is full of interesting details about his duties as a chaplain. He discusses the horrors and inhumanity of war, as well as examples of kindness and courage that seemed to restore his faith in humanity. The personal touches on his letters to his wife and children are charming and sometimes humorous.
   
   This is a marvelous book and a fine tribute to a man who, in his own words, strove "to be a good soldier and a good rabbi" during one of the most critical periods in American and Jewish history. Inspiring and educational, "The GI's Rabbi" is an outstanding contribution to both U.S. military history and Jewish studies. I strongly recommend this book for both academic and general audiences.



3. Rabbi Eichhorn's letters and diary entries portray a family man, soldier and rabbi. The book gives you not just a memoir of the war, but insights into his personal life (letters to his family), his own journals (detailed and much more frank about the war), and finally, reports to various Jewish agencies and the Army (the most disturbing ones of all). How he managed to experience all of this, and still retain his sanity and faith is astonishing. He is a man I wish I could have met, and I respect him highly for all that he did during his life.

2 comments about Black Becomes a Rainbow: The Mother of a Baal Teshuvah Tells Her Story.

1. Helpful book for parents of children who become bal teshuva. Realistic yet heartwarming and encouraging.



2. This narrative is mostly about the relationship between Natalie and her mother, Agi. Natalie comes from an upper middle class mainstream Jewish Australian family. Natalie eschews the comfortable upper middle class secular life that her mother envisions for her to become a baal teshuva, a repentant one. Natalie joins a Hassidic sect
   
   Black is a reference to the clothing Hassidic men wear and the rainbow is the joy Agi eventually finds in being the grandmother of five Hassidic children.
   
   Agi is at times meddlesome and disapproving and at others very helpful,
   
   Mother and daughter eventually come to accept each other's differences.
   
   Recommended for anyone interested in the Bal Teshuvah movement, Hassidism, or any non-religious mother who feels lost or distraught because her son or daughter has joined a fundamentalist religion

1 comments about Witness to Annihilation: Surviving the Holocaust.

1. Samuel Drix was a physician in Lvov, was one of the great Jewish communities of pre-war Poland, whose fate under the Nazis was one of the worst and yet gets little attention from historians. Drix was caught in a roundup and sent to the Janowska camp on the outskirts of the city. This camp left few survivors. Run by some of the most vicious commandants, Janowska had hardly an equal in the brutal treatment of its prisoners. Drix's memoir is unusual for several other reasons. It is one of the few accounts of a professional; it gives a vivid glimpse into the conditions in the Lvov ghetto as well as in the camp and it tells of Drix's remarkable escape from certain death and his subsequent , quite startling, experiences among Polish and Ukranian peasants in the countryside where he survived in hiding until the end of the war.

5 comments about Cravings: A Sensual Memoir (Bluestreak).

1. Jyl Felman is an excellent writer who captures very moving and powerful experiences in an economical style that held my attention and had me wanting more. Ms. Felman juggles many emotions in this short work. The reader finds herself dealing with mother/daughter relationships, Jewish history, feminism, lesbianism, the Holocaust, and food. I highly recommend this book.



2. The story is compelling but I can't make it past the first 50 pages because of the way the author puntuates. Her writing style is very distracting. I do not recomend this book.



3. I read this book in preparation for a class that I took of Jyl's while I was attending Brandeis, where Jyl teaches (last I heard- I graduated 1999). Because I knew Jyl, I heard her voice in my head reading that unusual puncuation. It makes a lot more sense if you know her. A lot of her personality and individuality came across. Jyl has a amazing style and grace that I admire greatly, and is an excellent professor. She made us write on the spot, and read our stuff aloud right in class. There was always something going on, something emotional and tender- just like in the book. I was at once comfortable and extremely uncomfortable- when it got personal. I began to wonder about my relationship with my two sisters. Definitely an experience and well worth the time to understand the structure of the book.



4. While Ms. Felman's book is meant as a commeration of the death of her mother, and thus one feels some sympathy, I felt that her book was self-indulgent. Most particularly because of its usage of indecipherable punctuation, (a usage that implies a desrespect for the reader), but also because of the fact that almost every other paragraph seems to be either a request for pity or a request that one concur that the world is a rotten place. In transactional analysis, such cynisism and victimhood is known as "grievance collecting," and one does begin to feel that one is functioning as Ms. Felman's therapist.



5. Even though the punctuation is unorthodox, this is the way I think sometimes (in fragments). It wasn't distracting or hard for me to understand. I can also closely identify with the emotions brought forth in this text in terms of growing up in the same era and losing a parent, and believe that most "baby boomers" would feel the same way. This was wonderful summer reading!

3 comments about Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl: The Memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology).

1. Okay, so I Google myself. That's how I discovered this astonishing memoir, published (1913) in Warsaw in Yiddish, by a man who may or may not be my blood. I read the Hebrew translation in 2001 and corresponded a bit with Editor/Translator Dr. Assaf, a professor of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. Assaf is a thorough and inspired scholar. The Hebrew edition was superb, and the English edition is, too.
   
   Yekhezkel Kotik was born into one world and lived long enough to die in another, one in which nearly all physical remants of the old were vanished. An essentially medieval culture, on the periphery of the Russian Empire, unchanged for nearly a milleniuum, was in the course of Yekhezkel's adulthood swept away by the ripples of modernity which swept through the Russian Empire.Kotik was born in a small town in the Belarus -Lithuanian region of the Pale of Settlement, at a time when most men expected to spend their entire lives within a few kilometers of the spot where they came into the world. The 19th Century, however, did not end as it had begun. The emergence of industry, global commerce and the fundamental transformations of political economy which devolved from and fueled these tectonic shifts set people in motion to an unprecedented degree.
   Kotik's adult life was strikingly modern. He resettled himself several times in different towns in Belarus and the Ukraine, operating ( with generally disappointing results) a series of businesses. He came to rest in cosmopolitan Warsaw, where he opened what turned into a thriving coffee house much favored by the city's Jewish intellectuals, artists, activists, bon pensants and bon vivants. Yekhezkel flourished in this milieu, and became locally famous as an organizer and promoter of all manner of cooperative societies.
   
   Late in his life, Yekhezkel's socialist son Avraham urged him to write a memoir. It had become clear by this time, the early 20th Century, that the millenium of shtetl life in the Pale of Settlement would otherwise leave few traces of its existence. Yekhezkel, who had never before written anything but pamphlets and corporate by-laws, applied himself to the project and produced the first volume of a planned three. The book was made available to the leading Yiddish writer of the time, Sholom Aleichem, who declared it superior to anything he himself had written. Kotik's subsequent efforts were somewhat less well received, but now I'm giving away too much !
   
   For me, Yekhezkel Kotik is an inventor, possibly the greatest of all time. He invented a time machine.
   
   
   Paul Kotik
   Plantation, FL USA



2. My next-door neighbor raved about this book when he read the Hebrew translation. It was more recently translated into English and I received a copy as a birthday gift. There is a very long introduction that I suggest that readers read only after reading the actual memoir first. The intro then becomes much more meaningful.
   
   The book was written in 1913 and describes what life was like in Kamenetz - the shtetel that he grew up in. It was a typical Eastern European shtetel and the period the book covers is the 1850's and 1860's. It is amazing how the author so clearly captures the spirit of that period. He wrote the memoir as a series of little vignettes - each one describing a different aspect of life in his village. Some of the stories are comical and some are sad. Relations with the non-Jewish population is discussed as well as the relations with the representatives of the Tsar.
   
   My grandparents came from Eastern Europe and after reading this book I felt that I was given a rare treat - a glimpse into my own past.



3. My great great grandparents lived in Kamenets. Their children spread thruout that region before they and their children left for America, Israel, Moscow, and South Africa. This book's explanation of the 19th Century social and economic order of this town and its environs finally allows me to understand, interpret and to place into perspective the stories my grandfather told especially in regard to Jews, the Polish overlords, Belarussian serfs and Russian rulers. Anyone interested in Jewish "family history" of that area of Grodno will greatly appreciate this book.

No comments about Revolutionary Forgiveness: Essays on Judaism, Christianity, and the Future of Religious Life.

1 comments about Escape from Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol.

1. Originally written in 1963 under the pseudonym "Jozef Lanik", Escape From Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol is the true story of author Alfred Wetzler's horrifying experience as a one of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust, his fortuitous escape, and most poignantly, his efforts to subsequently inform the world about the truth behind Nazi camps of mass murder. Escape from Hell describes in detail the inhuman atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, the ingenious plan made by the resistance movement in the camp, and how Wetzler successfully escaped with his friend Rudi Vrba. A chilling day-by-day account of life in Auschwitz, by a man whose determination to spread the truth likely saved more Jews from the machinations of the SS than any other single act. A "must-have" for Holocaust Studies shelves and collections.

5 comments about Divided Lives: The Untold Stories of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi Germany.

1. Many of the mischling women interviewed in this book state that the young people of today, especially Americans don't have any feeling whatsoever for what happened in WWII. Sadly, they are correct in that we learn about the war, but we don't learn about real life during the war. Facts and technical outlines of battles can only give one the surface of the struggle. To dig deeper, you need to read first person accounts such as the ones given in this book...stories of persecution and oppression that will make the war seem all too real. The paper thin line of distinction between Germans and Jews comes to life here with the children of Jewish/Christian parents who are ranked according to the amount of Jewish blood they carry...first degree half-Jew or second degree quarter-Jew. Most are saved from the concentration camps by their affiliation with their Aryan (German) family, but all suffer some amount of anti-semitism and persecution under the Third Reich. This is a revealing portrait of the fate of the mischlinge, a people who are often forgotten in the gruesome and humiliating saga of the holocaust.



2. "Divides Lives" tells the stories of woman living a in a real life "twilight zone" during the Third Reich. Dr. Crane brings her characters to life and the reader is swept into their confusing and frightening world. I am not particularly enamored by Holocaust literature. I have had my fill of books, articles and movies which portray the horrors of the camps. However, this book is different. These stories would stand by themselves regardless of the setting. The implications for our modern world, alluded to in the author's musings, are staggering. Anyone who enjoys short stories or biographies will absolutely love this book. I can hardly wait for Dr. Crane's next work.



3. After reading this accumulation of sensitive and very private stories by the subjects still alive in Germany, I recommended to the author that this book should be required reading in high schools across the USA.
   The women who dared have their stories told survived an unbelievable period in German history in the 1930s and 40s. Reading the painful recollections of the personal experiences of the subject Jewish women under the domination of the Third Reich reveals an awful human experiment too horrible to fully understand, but important that it be revealed.
   Readers will not be disappointed in the revelations extracted by the author, who has a personal connection to this period in history. Her father was a fraternity brother of mine, and I only recently learned of the humiliations he suffered before he escaped to the United states at age ten. Humiliations that have affected him ever since.
   The author learned why her maiden name isn't the same as her father's original last name. And that triggered the quest to learn more, and thus the research in Germany and this book.



4. I remember reading a poem back when I was a boy about the poet's life in the segregation era south that his father white and his mother black and being subjected to bigots both black and white. Somehow the meaning felt true while reading this book.
   
   From the little boy who was beaten by nazi teachers because his father was Jewish, to the little girl whose Jewish father fled to America but sent divorce papers to his gentile wife, the stories here are in many ways far from pleasant. But not all the perpetrators are from the same group. A husband kicked out of the nazi party because of his wife's heritage, balanced against that of a girl kicked out of the BDM because of her heritage, only to discover after moving into in her new town the local BDM leadress telling her she was going to be in the BDM whether she liked or not 'unofficially'. A girl whose policeman father was driven mad by the stress and murdered by the T4 fiends to the loss of so many Jewish relatives by each, this is a very insightful book.
   
   Life was not happy for these women when they were girls. Being prevented form joining the BDM because of their heritage or kicked out if the BDM found out. Being kept out of many things. Being stuck in the middle of nazi germany with less than politically correct heritage under allied bombs. Somehow they survived to tell their stories.
   
   I didn't think it was up the the standards of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers, but that book drew from a larger pool of individuals.
   But within its small scale, it's pretty good.



5. Unlike Schindler's List, in Divided Lives, a book by Cynthia Crane, the reader is able to put a face with a name and learn about personal experiences before, during, and after the war. No longer are these people just statistics, but they are actual people who had a life that was turned upside down by the Holocaust. Divided Lives is the type of resource that could be used in schools, especially high school, to show the truth about what Holocaust victims went through day after day and the effects it had on the rest of their lives. Divided Lives not only shows students about the uniqueness of this period in history, but children can also connect on an emotional level and learn an appreciation for their own lives and the human race.

5 comments about Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America.

1. The Jews and African Americans share a history of suffering and bigotry unequaled in recent times. History suggests that they should be the closest of partners in dealing with these issues. However to read the news you would think that they were historical enemies. This has not always been true. The Alliance between Jews and African Americans was a powerful force for change over most of this century. Jonathan tells the story of that Alliance and how it fell apart.

   As a journalist Jonathan tells this unique story from the perspective of important individuals on both sides. He traces them and their changing perspectives through these significant historical changes. It is this personal perspective that makes Jonathan's stories so compelling.




2. Both Jews and blacks have suffered greatly in various parts of the world. In the United States, there has been somewhat of alliance between the two groups. Brokedn Alliances deals with this alliance, like the NAACP having many Jewish lawyers and how Jews and Blacks came toghether for the civil rights movement. It also deals with how these groups have been losing contact due many factors like black anti-semitism and the importance of Israel to American Jews.

   Broken alliances is definetely something people should read if they want a better understanding of the history of race relations.




3. I highly recommend this book - particularly the section on "the last Jewish liberals" who tried to make integration, civil rights work for their family in a changing South Side Chicago neighborhood.

   It didn't work, they eventually fled the lowrer class, Black takeover and moved to the suburbs, only they stayed longer than the other Whites.

   The book works well because the author writes very personal stories that present the truth about what happened.




4. This book takes a good look at some social problems in America. It was written in 1988, but I have the updated edition from 1995.
   
   Blacks and Jews are minorities that cooperated during the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s. And there is still some cooperation on that issue, as various states continue to discriminate against minority voters.
   
   We see some of the cooperation and also some of the problems as this book as the experiences of six different people are examined in detail.
   
   Paul Parks, a Black who joined the civil rights movement in the 1960s, in chosen as an example of one who valued a Black-Jewish alliance. In April 1945, he was one of the soldiers who liberated the concentration camp at Dachau. But in 1967, he noted that there were complaints by some Blacks about Jewish landlords in the ghettos. Parks wanted to distinguish between the slumlords and those Whites who were actively helping the Blacks, given that without White support, Black causes would be hurt. But we see how many of the more politically involved Blacks thought of the Jews not as another minority but as part of the White majority.
   
   Next, we see Jack Greenberg and Esther Brown, who filed a landmark suit against segregated schools (Brown versus the Board of Education). These were Jews who saw the issue "not as a Negro cause but as a human cause." Still, there were problems when some Blacks decided to boycott a class that Greenberg taught at Harvard on "Race and the Law" to protest the fact that the instructor was not Black.
   
   After that, there is the story of Rhody McCoy, a Black who became the head of the Ocean Hills-Brownsville school district in New York City. Right away, there was a problem with a teacher strike. McCoy kept the schools open by hiring sustitute teachers, but this soured relations with the strikers. The issue became bigger, bitter, and painful, and certainly reduced cooperation among Blacks and Jews in the city.
   
   The story Kaufman tells next is of Roz Ebstein and her family. Hers was just one of many Jewish families in Chicago that supported the civil rights movement in the 1960s. But we discover the effects of blockbusting, as her neighborhood, rather than becoming integrated, simply became almost exclusively Black. Eventually, she and her family felt forced to move to a new neighborhood, a few miles away, in order to be in a better school district and to avoid harrassment from Blacks.
   
   There is an excellent section about Martin Peretz, who became the editor of The New Republic in 1974. Right away, we see one effect of Black-Jewish cooperation, namely that some Jews who learned more about Black culture and history decided they might as well learn about Jewish culture and history as well. Peretz, a liberal, couldn't stand Begin, a conservative Israeli Prime Minister. But Peretz made a point of supporting Israel's right to exist in the New Republic. Peretz, a stong supporter of civil rights, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the civil rights movement. But a turning point came in 1967, with the National Convention on New Politics. This group became dominated by radicals who tended to ignore problems of poverty, oppression, the war in Vietnam, racism, and discrimination and instead attacked Zionism. Peretz was more cautious about which groups he supported after that.
   
   The final chapter is about Donna Brazile, a well-known political campaign chairwoman. We see her introduction to issues that were separating Blacks and Jews: Jewish landlords, failure of some Jews to support affirmative action, and failure of some Blacks to support Israel. Plus, some specific problems, such as the firing of Andrew Young as UN ambassador and Black Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson meeting with terrorist leader Yasser Arafat. Through all this, Brazile kept her focus on trying to get as diverse and inclusive group of supporters as possible in her campaigns.
   
   I was struck by the mention of Alice Walker, who wrote "The Color Purple." Walker is well-known as a sensitive and thoughtful person. The book tells that when asked about Farrakhan, she condemned him as a bigot and an antisemite. But the book also tells of Walker's attitude about Israel, and this shocked me. I'm not asking that she favor some minority, whether it be Blacks, Jews, Pagans, or anyone else. But I am asking someone with her credentials to support human rights against aggressive and lying tyrants, thugs, and bullies. I feel that Walker should have found some way to oppose antizionism very strongly, and I certainly condemn her for not doing so.
   
   I think the issue of cooperation among minorities is important. There is a tendency for minorities, often in an effort to win favor with the majority, to show hostility to other minorities. That is not the true path.
   
   I recommend this book.



5. Kaufman's basic assumption is that the alliance between African-Americans and Jews was never as smooth as history makes it out to be. By exhaustively researching that alliance and presenting it through the points of view of six prominent leaders of the Civil Rights movement, Kaufman provides a unique overview of the racial issues of the previous century, but it is not without flaws. First, like many liberals, Kaufman is too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument. Thus, he goes into great detail in explaining away Black antisemitism, but never seems to realize that there is no Jewish equivalent. Black outrage over the lack of Jewish support for affirmative action is constantly brought up throughout the book, but the use of quotas to restrict Jewish admissions to Ivy League schools is mentioned only twice, creating the impression that Jews were opposed to affirmative action out of a desire to avoid competition, rather than out of fear of being shut out (again) of the professions. He routinely glosses over the records of many of the militant Black leaders who took over after Dr. King's assassination, making them seem simply outspoken or radical, rather than thuggish or criminal, as in the case of the Black Panthers, for example. Anti-semitic acts are routinely explained away as having been taken out of context (his history of the Oceanhill-Brownsville controversy provides a context for the reading of a virulently anti-semitic poem on WBAI that all-but excuses it). His coverage of the Crown Heights riots (in the updated version of the book) avoids mentioning critical facts about the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum and subsequent acquittal of Lemrick Nelson which cast the Black community in a poor light (the jury actually partied with Nelson after the acquittal). The final chapter of the book is a discussion of the importance of the alliance, but it is written on the presumption that political conservatives dislike both Blacks and Jews and are relishing the fight, which is stated explicitly, and which diminishes the value of the book as a historical record. In the end, it's simply an attempt to get Jews to keep giving money to Democrats and Blacks to continue to vote for them so that they can defeat those evil conservatives. Given the rise of anti-semitism since 9/11, the history in this book is even more critical to understanding the schisms in American culture, but Kaufman's bias reduces its value, taking what could have been the definitive history of a critical alliance in the Civil Right movement and reducing it to a partisan appeal.