1 comments about Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works.

1. Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works by Herbert A. Davidson (Oxford University Press) offers a thorough survey of the life and writings of this most influential Jewish thinker. The work gives a refreshing account of his life and influence with a close survey of all existent writings. In the process some surprising facts about his life and times come to the fore as well as some common myths are dispelled. Important for beginners and scholars alike.

5 comments about The Peddler's Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi.

1. Edward Cohen has written an autobiography whose candor, extraordinary insights, and universality allow the reader to delve deeply into questions and issues that demarcate each of our lives to one extent or another. With events of his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood depicted with the sensorial, emotional, and socio/political specificity of a first-rate novel, Mr. Cohen has accomplished a remarkable feat, both as an individual and a writer: He has escaped the solipsism that can easily extinguish a seemingly narrowly prescribed life. His vivid imagination has allowed him to take us on a journey into a world and time filled with intolerance and social upheaval which he, with painstaking honesty, intertwines with self-revelations regarding his own role within this/his/our eternally imperfect world. Like a good bildungsroman, Peddler's Grandson succeeds in enticing the reader to care deeply for the protagonist, whose pratfalls we laugh at, whose loving renderings of people and places we love as our own, and whose ultimate discovery of his road to liberating self-acceptance fills us with hope. A work of great depth and breadth, Peddler's Grandson is an extraordinary tour de force.



2. Exploring the consequences of straddling two cultures, "The Peddler's Grandson" proves that being Jewish in the deep South is a lot more than playing Dixie with a klezmer band. Accurately subtitled "Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi," Edward Cohen's enjoyable and instructive memoir recounts the author's childhood in post World-War II Mississippi and explores the dynamics of being a dual outsider: A Jew in the Bible Belt and a southern Jew in a cosmopolitan Jewish university. Written with perceptive sociological insight and engaging self-deprecatory humor, this memoir sheds light on the profound issue of marginality. As Edward Cohen grows up, he leaves the safe cocoon of his protective Jewish home and discovers the strangely alluring and frightening Christian South.

   The grandson of an intinerant peddler, Cohen explains both the coherence of a Jewish life and the centripetal influences the dominant culture exerts on that identity. Once in the public school system, Cohen feels a need to reinvent himself, from invisible Jew to iconoclastic rebel. Yet, with each recreation, Cohen feels less complete, even more dissatisfied. Where he yearns for a fusion of his dual Southern/Jewish identities, he experiences alienation and distancing from both. Culminating with four experimental years at Miami University, his story both extols and berates the divisive nature of his existence.

   At its best, "The Peddler's Grandson" serves as a model for every immigrant seeking authentic identity in his/her new land. At once desperately seeking inclusion but discovering that the price of admission is cultural abdication, Cohen warns about the notion that one can gain identity by erasing one's past. "From the first day my Jewish self was suddenly full-immersion baptized into that southern world, I wanted to reconcile what couldn't be joined." We watch, with admiration, as Cohen reaches an adult acceptance of who and what he is. "I've learned the difference between discovering who I am and inventing it. Invention for me meant erasure, and whether it was my southern or my Jewish half that I hoped to lose, each time I tried, I got smaller."

   "The Peddler's Grandson" is not pedantic in the least. Delightful family history and marvelous anecdotes pepper this memoir. Cohen's battles with the dyspeptic Rabbi Nussbaum over issues ranging from the existential meaning of life to the Edward's refusal as a child to eat a hard-boiled egg at Passover ring with Jewish humor. With characteristic grace, however, is Cohen's admission that he admires his adversary as a civil rights' leader. The author does not have to mention that Nussbaum's home was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan; yet in so doing, Cohen reminds us of his own profound ambivalence over racism during the late 1950s and early 1960s. One senses that the adult Cohen has not forgiven himself for his acquiescent silence during that crucial decade; indeed, his compassionate recounting of the African-Ameicans who worked in his family's clothes store indicate a sensitivity that began during that formative period.

   Cohen writes with an assurance he lacked as a child. His memoir is warm, comforting, and, in parts, genuinely inspiring. The author's adult confidence derives, however, from that childhood, both Southern and Jewish. His adult confidence in his roots and his place in both worlds blossoms from a family which, although profoundly assimilated, nevertheless recognized its marginality. His Jewish identity, compromised by an alien culture which celebrated physicality instead of intellectualism, emerges secure; his Southern roots, nurtured by three generations of life in Jackson, Mississippi and tarnished by national denigration of the very name of his state, endure. Thus, Edward Cohen, child of a Jewish peddler who settled in a locale far beyond the reaches of Northern urban Jewish influence, represents the best of the Ameican expeience; his cultural dialectic results in the best of all possibilities -- a genuine multiculturalism.




3. Interesting insights abound in this wonderful book about growing up Jewish in Mississippi during the 50's and 60's. Mr.Cohen introduces us to his family, friends and surroundings in a way that kept me from putting the book down. I read it in two sittings on a rainy weekend in Rhode Island and I felt like I was on vacation in Mississippi.



4. A wonderful tale that had me captivated from the first page. Whether you're Jewish, southern or just an appreciative reader... the descriptive flow of this tale is unparalleled.

   Cohen writes an excellent tale that weaves the stories of his immigrant grandparents into the time of his owning "bringing up" and struggle with his ethnicity, spiritual and regional. The characters are interesting and personal. The descriptions of the region and of the family scenes create clear mental pictures.

   This is a book that I intend to add to my own collection.




5. If you think you're getting "Driving Miss Daisy", you're mistaken. I thought I was going to read about a Southern Jew inviting his goyish friend over, and the friend would call matzo balls "them big old balls that Jews toss in the soup" or matzos "them big old Jew-crackers" and I was sadly mistaken. This book has no humor.
   This book isn't funny, interesting, educational, or even worth reading. I didn't learn anything new about the Jews of the Delta. All I learned was that Edward Cohen was a typical Jewish baby-boomer growing up in Mississippi, blissfullly ignorant of the lives/habits of his fellow Dixies, white or black.
   The only interesting thing is where the NAACP comes to town, and demands that stores hire more black employees, or face boycotts. The Cohen store (and others) suffer because of this, and eventualy all the stores go out of business. It shows you the dark side of the Civil Rights Movement.
   Some of the greatest literature/film/drama come from the South. But this is no "Southern Gothic" like John Grisham or "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." It's not a Southers comedy like "Steel Magnolias" of "Fried Green Tomatoes." There's nothign original or plot-driven about this book. It's just plain dull.
   
   You can't tell a Southern story that's "dull."

2 comments about My Mother's Sabbath Days: A Memoir.

1. Grade is a brooding writer, but one who also writes with grace and humor. "My Mother's Sabbath Days" is a memoir in the same way that Jorge Semprun's "Literature or Life" is a memoir, or Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." It is an artful recreation of a way of life, that is to say, a work of fiction in the most profound sense, a work that reproduces not only the surface of reallity, but its inner depths. Grade's reputation still lags far behind his deserts. He is certainly the equal of Isaac Bashevis Singer, but he recreates the world of Polish Jewry with less mockery and with a more brooding sense of tragic loss.



2. Mr. Grade paints with words a lively, personal look at Jewish life in the Jerusalem of Lithuania in the twilight of its existence. "My Mother's Sabbath Days" is written in a way that enables the reader to feel as if he or she is in Vilna with Mr. Grade. We share the burden of day to day life, the joy and peace of celebrating the Sabbath, and an unforgettable journey with the simple Jews of Vilna, right before the bloody tide of the Shoah swept into history this unique way of life in Eastern Europe.

1 comments about Marc Chagall: The Lost Jewish World.

1. This wonderful and richly illustrated book is an in-depth study of the Jewish roots of Chagall's art. Divided into nine chapters, it explains the cultural context in which Chagall's paintings were created, the outside influences (Leon Bakst, Picasso...), the themes (death, life, wedding, pregnancy...), the early masterpieces of the 1910's and 1920's, the influence of Yiddish culture and the schtetl (the lost Jewish world...), of the theater, in a nutshell what made Chagall one of the greatest artists of the first half of the XXth century (in this respect, one should forget about his later years, the 1960's and 70's, which the book barely studies and when he himself admitted to becoming repetitive if not merely commercial). An indispensable addition to the literature on the artist.

5 comments about The Face of a Naked Lady: An Omaha Family Mystery.

1. Though I generally dislike mystery's, I really enjoyed this book. This is and was a man's life, a real story was being told. What a great book. From the first page I was sucked in. Rips is a wonderful storyteller, knowing just the right amount of humor to throw in. Who knew that Omaha's history was so interesting. I felt that I was sitting i history class ( I love history) drinking up facts about Al Capone's ties to Omaha, brothels and slaughter houses. There were parts of the books that lagged a bit, but its still worth the read, Rips finally finds the naked woman and he finally knows the man that was his father.



2. An entertaining tall tale from the heartland. I didn't believe one thing in the book, which isn't good when you're supposedly writing non-fiction. A lot of the book takes place in the city where Rips Senior lived, Omaha, and at a second rate hotel, the Congress, populated by a gang of absurd down-and-outers a la Wim Wenders' Million Dollar Hotel. When Nick Rips dies, his son Michael finds some art photos of a black woman among his dad's papers. This book is his account of how he tried to find out the identity of this mystery woman. Ii involves a lot of white guilt.
   
   It's hard to work up any interest in finding out what lies in the past of such a dud.
   
   "My father had no interest his children and none in himself. The respect that other men sought among their peers, the standing that other men gained through philanthropic or religious involvement, was of no concern to him . . . He laughed, sang, and danced; for him life was an enjoyable, small place." His sentences are first rate, it's the content that disappoints. In a typical Rips anecdote, Michael recalls a neighbor girl, Claire, who walked into her brother's room when she heard him laughing and singing, "Ducks and geese and Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry, When I take you out in the surrey" and found her brother lying on the bed having sex with a live chicken, breaking its neck at the moment of orgasm to increase his pleasure. Does this ring true, that people in the modern era have chickens strutting around their house and that every time someone wants chicken, they kill one? Even in Omaha? It's sort of funny when the narrator whispers to a stuffy woman at dinner that "there's semen in the chicken," but not really so funny, it was funnier in PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT. Practically nothing in the book has even a touch of reality, or if so, it was better done by Philip Roth, Richard Brautigan, or Garcia Marquez.
   
   And yet, if you're looking for a good piece of magical realism, one that makes Omaha gleam like the towers of Trebizond, this is probably the book for you. It says that the author lives in the Chelsea Hotel, where Bob Dylan wrote "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." He has a bright future as a fabulist, but I don't actually trust him as far as I can choke my chicken.
   
   The poet Weldon Kees is one of the secret inspirations for this book. The characters debate whether or not Weldon Kees committed suicide, as the police concluded, by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955. Or is it possible that he sneaked back to Nebraska and was living there at the Congress Hotel perhaps?



3. A fellow book club member said that he would give this book one star just for the fact that the author was actually able to get it published. Building on this theory, I am willing to give it another star because I did find many of the anectdotes interesting and/or funny. If it were't for those 2 things, I don't know if I would have given this book any stars.
   
   I was under the impression that this would be a book about a son searching for his late father's identity, trying to uncover some fammily secrets upon the discovery of some paintings of a naked lady in the family's basement, and I think this is what the author intended; however it seemed to me that all this was was a collection of stories about some interesting characters that peopled Omaha, NE over the last century. I think if the book had been titled "A Collection of Stories of the Colorful People in Omaha's History" I would have been more satisfied because I wouldn't have had any expectations for a plot. The author was all over the place, there was no discernable story line that I could find, and I didn't think the revelation of who the naked lady was was all that spectacular. Skip it or change your expectations.



4. Probably the most creative part of this book is it's title and jacket. This is not a mystery story, and the search for the lady in the paintings is just a minor journey, interspersed with dozens of peripheral characters that come and go in a flash. Some funny moments halfway through the book in events that probably didn't really happen (his grandmother getting sucked up a garbage chute into the kitchen from the basement during a tornado)are much welcome after his meandering into unrelated asides from classical literature. It's a short book that should have been much shorter.



5. This was a completely worthless reading experience for me. It seemed like there was the potential for a good story here, but Michael Rips never really got around to it. He was too in love with his own "quirkiness" and telling bizarre little side tales without explanation.
   
   The non sequiturs in this book were numerous enough to fill up a book of their own. A few random moments and diversions can be entertaining but, for the most part, this was nothing but random moments with brief glimpses of a plot. Over and over again a new character would be introduced for one anecdote--invariably being a disturbing, violent, or sexual one--and then never mentioned again. That would be it. Nothing to do with the larger narrative, no thematic point to it, nothing.
   
   There was the potential of a good book here, but it simply got lost beneath the author's own extravagances and pretension.

3 comments about My Tainted Blood.

1. This is an extremely well-told story of a most unusual youth -- one Kueter spent hiding his Jewishness from the Nazis and from his neighbors in wartime Germany. In addition to the anxieties of being sent off to a concentration camp, there were the more everyday concerns of hunger, concerns Kueter attended to with a Robin-Hood-like panache. Robin Hood plus Reynard the Fox: those two role models helped the teenaged Kueter outwit the authorities and consistently provide food for an extended family. In addition to tales of derring-do, there are recipes that show that even as a boy, Kueter was already a chef/restaurateur-in-training. An unusual addition to wartime memoirs/Holocaust memoirs. This is a tale not to be missed.



2. The author grew up secretly Jewish in a Europe controlled by the Nazis. Only now, decades later, he writes about how it was for his alter ego (Horst)in this partly autobiographical story. He and his mother did finally make it to the USA after the war but by then he had grown almost to manhood. The story is a partly fictionalized window into his personality and the weird conditions of life during that time of turmoil and great personal danger. In real life, Mr. Kueter became a gourmet chef and for almost 30 years ran a restaurant in Maine specializing in continental cuisine - - an outcome foreshadowed in this tasty novel.



3. "My Tainted Blood" is the compelling, semi-fictionalized autobiography of survival in war time and post-war Germany as a half-Jewish teenager, as he negotiated his way amidst the uncertainties that lurked with every new social encounter. Finding enough to eat was commonly a priority, a problem often solved creatively by the wiles of the writer. Hubert Kueter's story is captivating and even humerous as it moves the reader from one crisis to another in a dangerous world. Vividly presented, this story is a must for the American reader far removed from the personal everyday experiences of life in Germany during those years. Superbly told, it is a window into an extraordinary time in our recent history from the perspective of one who lived it. This is truly an important work!

5 comments about Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History.

1. Although this book has a slow start with a lot of historical information, once you get to the Holocaust section, you will not be able to put this book down. I read it while in Vienna and after I visited Prague. I felt so connected to my surroundings and the author that I literally felt like I was in the book. Makes the enormity of the Holocaust personal and understandable. A MUST READ FOR EVERYONE!



2. This book was a beautiful personal tribute to the author's ancestors.
   
   I was engrossed in this book from the first page...although it was a slow read for me, because I wanted to grasp the intensity of the generational saga, and grasp the historical facts, correctly. Epstein has more than proved herself in this dramatic memoir of family generations, identity, and history, weaving us through time, each piece of family fabric a part of the final tapestry. The reader is given remnants and squares of fabric in a familial tapestry, of sorts, through history and time, through the horrors of war, and how it affects all the generations, from past to present. From assimilating into society and racial and religous identity, to how one views themselves and what they identify with, Epstein manages to stitch a tapestry of her family, each stitch in time adding to the fabric of her own identity. Bravo for a wonderful read!



3. This is a fascinating chronicle of three generations of the author's female ancestors. It is probably the only book in English that tells the story of Jewish women in Prague in the the first half of the twentieth century. Helen Epstein has a special talent for recreating social history and bringing it alive.



4. Beautifully written, WHERE SHE CAME FROM is also the product of very serious and exhaustive research. It is a magical and haunting book. It brings alive a period of Jewish women's history that is only now being written about in English. Travelling through pre-Holocaust Central Europe with Epstein is an amazing experience: the reader follows both the process of investigation of family history and the emotions this opens up for the writer.
   
   I taught the book several times both in the US and Mexico in classes on Memory and Autobiography. My students loved the book. Many of them bought several copies to give to relatives and friends as gifts. My graduate students (in History and Literature) were impressed by the rigor of Epstein's research, and the skill with which she weaves historical information into her prose.



5. In WHERE SHE CAME FROM, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based award-winning author Helen Epstein has penned a meticulously-researched memoir to the four generations of Czech and former Czechoslovak women in her extensive family, from her mother's side of the brood.
   
   While today she associates her public persona to the proud and extensive line of former Czechoslovak Epsteins (see Ms. Epstein's fabulous Amazon Short available off of this site, SWIMMING AGAINST STEREOTYPE: The Story of a Twentieth Century Jewish Athlete), the writer stakes her claim to a noble and illustrious family line which once proudly sported famous Viennese and Prague-based surnames such as Rabinek, Solar, Weigert, Sachsel, Furcht, and Frucht.
   
   Like an experienced batsman for a World Series-winning major-league baseball team, Epstein managed to hang in that old batter's box, waiting for just the right pitch to slug out of the ballpark. In the book world, the analogue was when all the right moments fortuitously transpired to assist Ms. Epstein in securing many essential clues of research which she utilized handily in crafting this excellent book's narrative. Even she'll tell you, the process was far from easy.
   
   Thanks to a dedicated coterie of like-minded collaborators based in points all around the globe as you'll soon read (the former Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic, Israel, South America, and the United States), Ms. Epstein succeeded in cobbling together one of the most comprehensive Czech geneological histories on the public record.
   
   The work is not only emotionally remunerative for Ms. Epstein, to the extent that those missing links in her family chain were finally sewn together, but it's additionally a fine account of several strong women, renowned in their various fields of endeavour, who persevered during the best of times and the absolute horrorific worst of the 20th century.
   
   Starting with Helen's great-grandmother Therese Sachsel, nee Frucht (Furcht), who lived during the reign of Franz-Josef in the last of the Habsburg-ian thrones, passing through her grandmother Pepi's life story during the turbulent First World War and the First Czechoslovak Republic, and finally overlapping the history of her own mother Frances Epstein, Helen pored over hundreds (if not thousands) of archival sources in constructing this cogent tale.
   
   Collectively, these three noble upstanding women belonging to the author's colourful past outlived the worst of the 20th century's ravages, passing fads, and tragic downfalls.
   
   We swoon with Therese Sachsel during the euphoria of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk's (TGM) storied first Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938), when all seemed possible for the Central European remant of the former Austria-Hungarian powerhouses of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakia. Our hopes and dreams are temporarily crushed alongside her grandmother Pepi Rabinek as we witness the invasion and subsequent occupation of Prague by Nazi hordes, who sweep unchallenged through the former Czechoslovakia's borders after the West's perfidy of Munich. We agonize alongside Pepi's daughter, Frances Solar/Rabinek/Epstein, the paragon of the family and Helen's stalwart mother, as she is dispatched to the Teresienstadt (in modern-day Terezin, Czech Republic) concentration camp, or in the colloquial Czech, the "koncentrak." We also rejoice when Frances is extricated from the hellhole of Auschwitz, and tranported the West in wartime Germany as part of a labour brigade, towards the oncoming Allies from the West, liberated in Bergen-Belsen by British forces at the end of WWII. Finally, we are shocked to discover the insensitivity, sheer apathy, and in many instances -- outright hostility -- that Praguers demonstrated towards the surviving returnees from the Nazi camps, to which Frances and her future husband, famous former Czechoslovak Olympian swimmer, Kurt Epstein, counted themselves.
   
   Helen Epstein's lines draw us inexorably into this story, and once you start you'll have a difficult time finding excuses to stop.
   
   What staggered me as I made my way through this read was Ms. Epstein's formidable discipline. The sheer single-mindedness with which she approached the colossal task of the near-vertical climb to reach the bottom of her family's history. I read with awe how solace was found towards the end.
   
   WHERE SHE CAME FROM will stand as one of the foremost examples of the self-researched memoir. If you need any reason at all to read this book, then let it be thanks to the iron-willed determination which the answers gracing its pages were unearthed by Ms. Epstein.
   
   A book like this needs to be savoured for its significance, appreciated for its illumination, and respected for its purity. There isn't a single letter which graces these pages that wasn't typed, written, or transcribed in the absence of a labour which can only be termed love.
   
   I sit back and wish we all had the staying power of Ms. Epstein. The book is laudatory in the extreme.
   
   As if Ms. Epstein's family history were not enough, there are other benefits to this book too. For those with a keen interest in the past two centuries of life in Prague and the experiences of Bohemia's and Moravia's Jews and its Czech peasantry, WHERE SHE CAME FROM is chock-a-block with painstaking factoids and historical tidbits that'll nudge you gently towards further reading. It will also supply its readers with a glimpse towards the increasingly-distant Czechoslovak past, which, with the passing of the years and the keener integration of this country with the rest of the EU, slips further and further away from the grip of Czech youth.
   
   This book is more than just a reminder, it's a testament to a time which no longer exists. In that respect, it is now part of the permanent historical record.
   
   WHERE SHE CAME FROM is written in a language at once accessible and magnetic. For all ages, for all backgrounds. I can't do anything less than award this superb work of history my highest rating of 5-stars.
   
   I know you will too.
   
   -- ADM in Prague

No comments about The Koran.

No comments about A Voice in the Chorus: Memories of a Teenager Saved by Schindler.

No comments about Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis.