2 comments about Today I Am A Boy.

1. This is one of those books that you could borrow from your library, or from a friend, but you will likely need to buy your own copy since there are so many passages that are either so wise, so funny, or so meaningfully touching that you will need to use your pencil in order to happily jot checkmarks, brackets, and asterisks throughout the book. I know that I did.

   David Hays has a surfeit of academic, personal, and professional accomplishments. In his sixties, he was semi-retired, kids grown, had good health and a happy family life. His mind is unquestioningly fertile (yet organized) and he seems to embrace new experiences. As a child he gazed into a mud bubble, and glimpsed eternity. As an adult he throws himself into the grass in his back yard, in order to look more closely at the earth. His life was full, and meaningful, but he does not brag, and he is likable from the outset.

   Rather than rest on his not inconsiderable laurels, he decides to become a Bar Mitzvah, joining a class of local eleven and twelve-year olds - in order to devote himself to study with his congregation's rabbi, Doug, for more than a year. It is this journey - and there is a steady unfolding, with no outburst of religiosity - that forms the starting point for this wonderful narrative.

   Hays has an ability to tell you a lot about himself by telling you about other people. He respects himself, and he respects others. He is never boring. His parents, in-laws, grown children, grandchildren, his wide circle of friends and acquaintances, and his classmates are interesting to him, and worthy of reportage. He lets you in on these people and their lives and their histories with unstinting (and never maudlin) respect, even awe. In doing this you find out a lot about Hays and his subjects. Their privacy is never violated, and their dignity is sustained.

   There is uncloying, laugh-out-loud humor throughout. Family lore emerges, and it is often funny. Hays delights in his wife Leonora's knack of elegantly summing up a situation with a trenchant malapropism. Of his new-found fervor for religious study, she says, "He hooked, line and sinker!" Of the Bahamas: "It's a third-war country." He also shares his family history, including a terrific (true) story, "How my family saved Israel." His feelings and observations as a sensitive member of his class (of the kids at recess he marvels, "They always know where to go.") - and his relationship with his wonderful rabbi - are a pleasure to watch unfold.

   Hays includes a piece on Anne Frank that is dramatic, thoughtful, and not at all funny. It is appropriately included, given that the concerns of an adult approaching his bar mitzvah are different from those of a child. And at one point, he attends a Harvard reunion - which maybe could have been left out of this book, with no loss of substance to this great story.

   In all, a wonderful book.




2. The topic of this book as stated is highly misleading. Yes, Mr. Hays traces some of his experiences on becoming a Bar Mitzvah at age 66. However, he digresses so much from this theme that it was downright annoying!

   I was really looking forward to reading about a 66-year-old man's journey into spirituality and rediscovery of Judaism, rather than a name-dropping autobiography.

   What little Mr. Hays did write about his spiritual journey back into Judaism was sparse, and even his way off-topic autobiographical sections didn't include much of his family's, friends',or peers' reactions to his becoming a Bar Mitzvah, which to me would have been very interesting.

   He also didn't talk much at all about contemporary Jewish renewal and problems of assimilation and how others might, as he did, find meaning in a religious path they've ignored or rejected.

   Why, instead, should I care that he went back for a school reunion and one of his class members won the Nobel Prize? Why should I have to wade through the life stories of some of his uninteresting relatives who are not even marginally part of his spiritual story?

   In this catch-all manuscript, Mr. Hays also tangentially subjects the reader to an entire fantasy theatrical piece he has imagined about a grown-up Anne Frank (for which I wouldn't buy a ticket, BTW).

   What we also get is too much information and commentary about the 12- and 13-year-olds in his class, including an inappropriate (IMO) dwelling on one of the pubescent girls about whom Mr. Hays admitted over and over he had major sexual fantasies.

2 comments about Independence Park: The Lives of Gay Men in Israel (Contraversions: Jews and Other Differenc).

1. I have read the draft of this book, and it is undoubtedly one of the most revealing, enlightening and entertaining writings on modern gay life in Israel. A must not only for readers interested in gay culture, but for anyone who wants to know more about young people - gay or straight - in modern Israel. The book comprises of a tapestry of interviews, whose translation artfully captures all layers of spoken Hebrew. These are complemented by the authors comments and shrewd observations, making it an accurate and up-to-date survey of modern Israel. Enthusiastically recommended!



2. This book presents a series of interviews conducted in the early 1990's with twelve self-identified gay Israeli men. These men are from a variety of backgrounds, social classes, and ethnicities. They are purported by Fink and Press to represent a broad selection of gay men in Israel. In fact, the majority of them are in their early to mid-twenties, Ashkenazi, single and non-religious. Two are immigrants. Two are married to women. One is a Christian Arab. Most of them are closeted.

   The book has twelve chapters; each based upon an interview with an individual man. Chapters begin with a brief vignette about how the authors encountered the subjects. These introductions provide an almost poetic description of the settings in which the interviews occurred. For example, one especially closeted man selected to meet at "Mt. Herzl, the official Israeli military cemetery and the serene, wooded burial site of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement"(p.50). One interview of a Jewish-Russian immigrant took place in his mother's apartment. She greeted the interviewers with refreshments, making them uneasy because she and her mother remained within earshot throughout. This particular interviewee was not out to his mother and grandmother. He promptly soothed the authors' anxiety, though, with the reassuring information that his family did not understand enough Hebrew to comprehend the nature of the discussion. While generally less ironic, there is always a sensitive description of the ambience and elaborate explanations of the events leading up to each interview. Other, more banal, meeting places included a kibbutz and some Tel Aviv apartments.

   Chapters seem to follow a similar structure. They all begin with childhood experiences, move on to periods of military service, discuss relationship and family issues, and conclude with the interviewees making declarations about their position on Zionism and contemporary politics. The final version presented in the book reads as a series of free-flowing monologues. Fink and Press note "we were continually amazed at the willingness of these men to share their secrets with us" (p. XVII). Indeed, these confessions derive much of their gripping charm from the genuine earnestness in which these men bare their souls. The only exception, "Dan," who immigrated to Israel from the United States as a teenager, "has reviewed the text of his interview with a censor's pen. `I expect that my kids will read this,' he explains" (p. 165). As a result, his sanitized account lacks the characteristically Israeli raw sincerity seen in the other accounts.

   The interviews were recorded in Hebrew and translated into English. "We have done our best to keep the vibrant spoken Hebrew of these men from becoming homogenized into a stagnant literary English" (p. XVIII). They succeed in communicating complete and differentiated personalities. These translations are a literary feat in their own right.

   A provocative introduction prefaces the entire book. It starts with a news item from an Israeli daily titled "Four Soldiers in Basic Training Had Oral Sex Party" (p. 1), which describes the Israeli army's mind-boggling tolerance and sensitivity in handling gay issues in the military. The authors conclude this amazing item with the comment, "The lives of gay men in Israel are not what you would think" (p. 4). They proceed to describe dramatic positive developments in Israeli politics regarding gay issues, manifesting in a "mad rash" (p. 9) of bills passed by the Knesset and court rulings granting various forms of equal rights to gays. They also describe a very positive public attitude to these developments. These glowing appraisals of the political scene in Israel regarding gay issues created an expectation that the lives of the men described in the text would be equally positive. Specifically, one expected that they would have succeeded in integrating their sexual identities with the rest of their personalities in some kind of holistic manner.

   Sadly, this expectation remained unmet. Reading this book, I felt that the upbeat promise of the introduction contrasted sharply with the picture of gay life in Israel described in the body of the work. The young authors, who state that they were in love with each other at the time, seem oblivious to the fact that these men were recounting dismal existences. Practically all of the men described continuing struggles with coming-out issues. Seven of them refused to give their real names for the book and, instead, chose to use aliases. They all articulated a longing to reach out to a gay community that seemed hardly present. All of them expressed a sense of marginalization in Israeli society and a fear, be it real or imagined, of rejection by loved ones. It seems that these men manage to cope by mobilizing significant denial and various forms of compartmentalization of their lives. Only one, Rafi Niv, provides a lucid assessment of the closeted nature of gay life in Israel. He is presented as an extremist by the authors. Yet his disillusioned views seem echoed in all of the other chapters. This gloomy vision I interpret from the text may simply result from the relative youth of the respondents, and possibly as well as that of the authors. Confusion about sexual identity, fear of the consequences of separation from family, and anxiety about the possibility of significant romantic relationships are all stage-appropriate concerns for young adults. The authors' uncritical acceptance of this pessimism startles. Either they do not recognize the problem, or it is one that is so pervasive in Israeli culture that they see no alternative. The older and more experienced interviewees seem to support the later view. They, like the younger men, do not envision the expectation of leading an integrated life in an accepting and respecting milieu with a committed, long-term partner.

   The authors allude to the political subtext of gay existence in a Zionist state. Linking the struggle for gay sexual identity with the struggle of the Jewish people to create Israel, they read the nascent gay movement as a similar kind of liberation. Independence Park in Tel Aviv is the best-known meeting place for gay men in Israel. Its name celebrates Jewish national independence. However, Fink and Press fail to perceive how individual struggles clash with the collective one in these histories. The authors define Zionism as "a form of Jewish politics developed in nineteenth-century Europe which argues that the Jewish people properly constitutes a nation and that its condition of geographic dispersal is an anomaly in need of correction in the form of political autonomy in the ancient Jewish homeland" (p. 6). A consequence of this is that Israeli society is based on the premise of similarity and conformity, rather than diversity. There is a constant tension that is felt in these accounts between living as a sexual minority in a society defined by its desire to emancipate itself from its minority status. The title of the book is very apt in a way unintended by the authors. Independence Park, rather than being a place associated with anything to do with independence, is infamous in Israel for furtive anonymous sex and bias attacks. It is a symbol of shame rather than of hope.

1 comments about The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes.

1. Great book specially if you're a Marrano yourself. Nothing comes easy to us marranos, to the gentiles we're the "Jews" to the Jews, we are the weak link of the race. This book bring forward the great potential of these much suffer group of people, who has suffer so much yet given so much to civilization.
   
   In Holland, in Belgium, in Turkey, in Greece most are unware of how much this group has help in the development of they countries, a must read for Jews and Gentiles like.
   
   The Baron of Fulwood

No comments about Memory of Kindness: Growing Up in War Torn Europe.

No comments about Carved in Stone: Holocaust Years - A Boy's Tale.

1 comments about No Time for Patience: My Road from Kaunas to Jerusalem : A Memoir of the Holocaust.

1. It's a short book, but Zev Birger's valuable memoir will not fail to move or impress. As a believer in humanity (despite tremendous suffering) and a champion of culture, he is a gift to the world.

2 comments about The Road to Katyn: A Soldier's Story.

1. I have this book in German where Amazon still sells it. I am also reading "The 79th Survivor" by Artur Rubinstein's brother-in-law, Bronislaw Mlynarski who is mentioned in Slowes' book and who was one of 79 to survive the Starobielsk Camp - where ironically the Soviets were hoarding Ukrainian grain being shipped by trainloads to Hitler in 1939-40.

   Publishers' Weekly review seemed to think Slowes was not the genuine article because he was not face down in some mass-grave with a Walther PK bullet in the back of his head.......no he is a living witness !

   The USSR invaded Poland on 17th September 1939 in coordination with the Nazis; they seized the 300.000 Polish troops preparing a last stand in the SE of their country against the Wehrmacht when the Red Army fell in their rear and carted them off to slave camps in Magadan and throughout the Gulags. The Officers were siphoned off to special camps - where these reservists, doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists could be denigrated, humiliated, robbed, starved, and experience life as prisoners of the NKVD not the Red Army. Was it in April 1940 that Beria and Stalin decided to do away with them ?

   Was this when the Nazis began construction of a new camp at Oswiecem known outside as Auschwitz ? Is this where Polish intellectuals and civic leaders were to be taken for liquidation (Jews did not arrive until late 1941) ? Is it true that the NKVD and SS ran a joint centre in Zakopane to coordinate the destruction of Poland's intelligentsia and independent leaders ? These are mentioned in the foreword to Slowes' book.

   The real value of Slowes' book is that he was a Jew in the Polish Officer Corps; and whereas many of the executioners of Stalin's NKVD who did the deed - not just at Katyn - were also Jewish - there has been a failure in many works to note that 15.000 officers is a huge under-estimate; and as Slowes points out there were at least 1000 Jews among those Polish Officers including the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army - they too 'disappeared'.

   We should recall that Katyn was an old Cheka killing-zone; and that the only reason we heard of it was because the German advance exposed it; but Britain and USA continued the Soviet line of it being a German atrocity (and I believe Germans did hang at Nuremberg for this Soviet crime).........The story that Stalin told Sikorski about these officers having gone missing -when the Second Polish Corps was created in 1940 and allowed to leave for Iran (before fighting at Monte Cassino)- when they had 200.000 soldiers (incl. Menachem Begin) and very few officers - Stalin said he had no idea where the officers were - can be seen as the cause of the split between Poland and the Allies as their interests became subordinated to Realpolitik.

   In 1991 this book mentions they found other mass graves with soldiers from Starobielsk I believe. The Russians are slowly providing information to the Poles - mainly Yeltsin - Gorbachev was too much the Party Man to own up to this.

   In addition to these officers murdered by NKVD executioners to deprive Poland of any hope of becoming a sovereign state again; we should remember the thousands of families deported from the Soviet occupation of half Poland's territory (still today) and deportation of families of these officers to slave camps in Siberia, or Kazakhstan; or simply their death by starvation or being drowned in barges in the White Sea.

   Is there anything to choose between SS and NKVD ? Not really, except that the Bolsheviks had a 20 year head-start on the Nazis: imagine over 1.000 Jews actually fled the Soviet Occupied Zone to get into the German General-Government Area !!!!

   I think this is a very interesting book about a subject people in Western Europe know very little, and which goes to the very heart of Poland's social and economic weakness even today, when one of the Great Evils of the 20th Century; Soviet Communism sought to decapitate a nation and destroy any hope of independence.......and in so doing killed around 25.000 Polish Officers who could have led those 200.000 soldiers of the 2nd Corps under General Anders (who had spent 2 years under NKVD interrogation in Moscow)........these were the men that fought and took Monte Cassino.......having discovered from Radio Berlin months earlier what really happened to their officers.....and their Allies recite the words taught them by Stalin blaming the Nazis for NKVD war crimes




2. Polish Jew Salomon Slowes describes his experiences in the 1939 war, Soviet captivity at Kozielsk camp, the unexpected relocation of POWs from this camp (mostly to their deaths, it later turned out), his arrival at Griazoviets camp, the German attack and partial amnesty, etc. He then met General Anders (pp. 112-113) and other released Poles. For a time, they were headquartered in the town of Yangi-Yul ("New Way")(pp. 154-165). (My mother, aunt, and grandmother were also there). From there, his travels took him to Teheran, Baghdad, Haifa, Cairo, Monte Cassino, and finally Palestine.
   
   On the one hand there is anti-Semitism; on the other hand there is Jewish particularism and conflicted loyalties. Slowes sporadically experienced Polish anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, but found it mitigated by higher-level officers (p. 96, pp. 124-125; p. 140). In a document now at the Hoover Institution, General Anders repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism (pp. 216-218).
   
   While a college student at Wilno (Vilnius), Slowes had belonged to Jordania, an organization opposed to Jewish assimilation (p. 57). After the Soviet "amnesty", Slowes, in opposition to the Bundist Ehrlich and General Anders himself, favored the formation of a separate Jewish legion to fight under Polish command (pp. 132-134). Slowes expressed hostility to Poland taking a regional leadership role after the war (p. 142).
   
   Slowes himself never condemns Communism, and has no problem calling Comsymps his friends--whose existence among the ranks of pre-amnesty Polish-Jew POWs he readily acknowledges: "A group of Jews, mostly university trained, with well-formed leftist views and sympathies for the Communist regime, were profoundly despondent and disappointed. Several of them had been friends of mine at the university...Relentlessly they tried to find someone who would listen to their demand for liberation as Soviet sympathizers." (p. 63)
   
   In the previously-mentioned document, Anders attributed the persistence of anti-Semitism in his ranks to: The 1939 Jewish-Soviet collaboration (which Anders said was not isolated; p. 216, 218), a series of anti-Polish incidents while in Soviet captivity, the limited slots in the Polish Army filled by the disproportionately-surviving (as it turned out) Jews (p. 216; also mentioned by Slowes--p. 124), the use of the Polish Army not out of loyalty to Poland but as a convenience by some Jews to leave the Soviet Union, etc.

1 comments about Thorn Lace: Mojmir - a Migrant's Lot.

1. ýThorn lace: Mojmir ý A Migrantýs Lotý is a melange of personal memoirs, reflections of pivotal historical thresholds that shape the soul of a nation and stories of persecution and migration. It is often said ý and rightly so ý that an individual is a mirror image of the family he or she stems from, has lived with and is identified by. And although of Croatian origin and breed, the bookýs hero ý Mojmir ý belongs to a more cosmopolitan family of people: migrants. The book gives a rare insight into the passion of Mojmir Damjanovic the migrant and the many friendships, psychological turmoils of the soul, bitter encounters, brushes with death due to political persecutions as well as adventures encountered in life when forced to flee poverty and persecution. Although the book is about a Croatian migrant its stories of survival ring familiar to the lives of every person whose fate in life steered him or her through the path of migrating into a new country, which is foreign both in language and culture. Hence, ýThorn lace: Mojmir ý A Migrantýs Lotý enriches the worldýs literature about the hard fate of migrants. And that hard fate, the ýlotý, is personified in this book in the heart and soul of Mojmir who is catapulted into living a double, two parallel lives: the living of a life of relentless love and nostalgia for his First homeland in his heart and the living with his physical presence and participation of the daily life of his Second (New) homeland through which he struggles to forge a new life in a ýforeigný land. The two lives, although parallel, often clash, often create hardships and often create a painful vacuum between a parent and child, especially when the parent and the child cannot communicate fluently in the same language.

   Memoirs? A Diary? A Dossier? A Novel? A witness for history? A lesson in survival in adversities? An odyssey through the human heart? Or all this and more combined in one book that is compelling and seizing. The author Ina Vukic has skilfully managed to combine personal memoirs of Mojmir Damjanovic, a Croatian migrant living in Australia, with excerpts from Croatian history into a cohesive and riveting flow, juxta positioning the psychological impacts of migration upon human souls. The book reads more like a fiction novel than non-fiction, and itýs the rich dialogue and direct speech with which this book is written that makes it so uniquely appealing and lively.

   ýThorn lace: Mojmir ý A Migrantýs Lotý takes us on an incredible voyage of courage and determination. Itýs every chapter begins with quotations from well known personalities of ýWesterný literature and politics, the quotations that guides the reader to the moral underflow, which will follow, evoking curiosity, gripping the reader to continue reading, nudging the reader to relive Mojmirýs world.

   ýMy beginning, conception and birth belong to a certain part of this rotating Earthýs ball that is most beautiful - to Croatia, the homeland of my ancestry, and the building of my home, my family and my personal wealth begin on the other side of the Earthýs ball - ýDown Underý, across the Equator, in the land of Aborigines, under the Southern Cross, on Terra Australisý. And so the story of Mojmir Damjanovic begins. From painful poverty of 1920's Croatia, to the despair of his father's untimely death, through the hardships of surviving World War II in Nazi occupied Austria, across the horror and suffering inflicted by Communists in post-War-Yugoslavia and the tragedy of the Croatian Holocaust, and the shrapnel of the Jewish Holocaust when he marries a German Jewess. With the driving urge to beat poverty and escape deadly persecution - came his migration to Australia in 1951. In Australia he will endure insufferable hardships, but his determination to rise above poverty and to conquer the scorching pain of persecution that had forced him to abandon life in his homeland witness his stepping stones to riches and success, even at the cost of fighting establishments and bureaucracy of the Australian ýEgg Boardý ý which threatened his prosperity as a hard working man ý for over two decades. It was this fight against bureaucracy that made Mojmir Damjanovic into a publicly known figure during 1980ýs in Australia.

   Indeed, Mojmir is a rebel! But - a rebel with a cause; a rebel who wins in the end. His cause is the truth. And there can ever be only one truth, about anything. Any other version is contrived, an opinionýIn this book he bares his soul, he bares all ý the author lets him speak, the author does not stop him even when he recounts the most intimate moments of his life ý at the points in a story where most storytellers stop, Mojmir continues.

   In my work as University lecturer I had rarely encountered a book that captures history of a nation through episodes of life experiences of one person. The easy and natural flow with which the author of ýThorn lace: Mojmir ý A Migrantýs Lotý manages to alternate between factual history of the Croatian nation and episodes of personal experiences of her hero, to mingle them in a logical mix, making history come alive, is the aspect which particularly seized my curiosity and admiration for this literary work.

   ANA BRUNING, B.A., M.A.

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