No comments about China Dreams: Growing Up Jewish in Tientsin (Singular Lives).

3 comments about Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (Texts and Contexts).

1. This is a book exploring the author's search for a childhood identity forged in Hungary in the shadow of the Holocaust and her family's subsequent emigration to the USA. For many complex reasons, childhood issues had not been addressed for much of the author's adult life. The book is a wonderfully evocative memoir of childhood, a search for a national identity and an accurate and sensitive portrayal of the sense of alienation felt by those with the immigrant experience. It is set in the background of the diary written by the author while she lived and worked in Budapest in an academic capacity. As she explores the issues around Hungary's newly found freedoms in the 1990s, she examines them in the context of the uglier aspects of Hungarian and European nationalism which had decimated Hungarian Jewry. Although told from the Jewish viewpoint, it has broad appeal and addresses many important aspects of the human condition.

   The author's considerable literary ability (she is professor of Romance Languages at Harvard) is evident in the exquisitely sensitive descriptions of events and emotions from both a child's and adult's viewpoint. She seems to have learnt well from the authors on whom she has based her distinguished career. Emotions leap at the reader from every page, often rapidly traversing the spectrum of joy, sadness, longing, confusion and humor. At all times there is a strong prevailing sense of the author's awareness of how her uniquely Hungarian Jewish background profoundly influenced every important outcome of her life and her world outlook.

   The dilemma of being an outsider, yet identifying culturally and nationally with a sovereign state is well known to many Jews and constitutes the fundamental European Jewish experience. Many of those (myself included) who underwent this in repressive political systems fled to the western world and became very successful and yet experienced a sense of national and cultural alienation in their adopted societies.

   Despite addressing emotionally charged, controversial and sometimes uncomfortable subjects, there is always a sense of lightness and what is almost playfulness. Not all issues are serious and there is one hilarious description of Hungarian toilets, which every Westerner must have felt (if not voiced) upon their initial experience with these dreadfully designed pieces of porcelainware.

   Although an emotionally charged book, it never descends into unrealistic sentimentalism - the message seems to be that no matter what we do with our lives, where we come from has a profound effect on who we are and how we see the events around us. Acknowledging this can be liberating.




2. It's in no way clear what any of this has to do with scholarship, either on the level of literature, history, or autobiography. Suleiman is clearly her own biggest fan, and the book does nothing but detail her personal celebration of herself. It is, for example, in no way clear what her name-dropping accounts of dinner parties and non-attended talks is supposed to signify within the context of serious, reflective scholarship. If you're sitting a qualfiying exam anytime soon for a degree in Susan Suleimanism, by all means read this book, but it is a waste of time for anyone else. Let's hope this volume sounds a death knell for academic self-aggrandizement: come back to earth Ms. Suleiman.



3. Further up "A reader from Cambridge" proved that he did not understand nothing at all. It's just for this guy that I do have to explain, that this book has nothing got to do with scholarships or so. It's hard to belive that he did not find out while reading the book to its end. He or she however seemed to have noticed in the end that he or she might blame himself or herself and therefore missed to leave the full name.

   For the rest of the world I would like to say that this is not big literature, but an important book. Once individuals stop to be interested to investigate in their history and to try to understand what was happening when and why, we will loose a chance to prevent dark parts of human history from coming back. This is why this book has a right to exist and this is what we can learn from it. It gives us an example for ourselves. And Suleiman does not celebrate herself, as her critic says, but gives us an unproctected view into her feelings. This makes her vulnerable and the "reader from Cambridge" takes his freedom to eagerly touch her wounds.

   I say it very clearly: Books like Suleiman's help to make sure that "readers from Cambridge MA" buy a book about the Iraque war the other day and complain that it is not really on the oil business.

4 comments about The Shadow of Death: The Holocaust in Lithuania.

1. Hello, Harry! I am your cousin, Leslie Hoffman Levenson (my mom's name was Ina Ginsberg, daughter of my grandfather Jack Ginsberg). I learned about your book on this title a while ago. I'd like to hear from you thru e mail shown at below (LEV10315@aol.com). Our cousin, Esther Ginsberg Cohen (daughter of Alex Ginsberg)also learns about you recently thru our cousin, Shelly and Marlee Ginsberg who went to the Museum of Holocaust in Wash. DC. Esther and I found each other by accident! Long story! We also found out there The Ginsberg brothers (Jack, Alex and Barney) did have sisters back in Lithuania we never knew ever existed). Please contact me and let you know that you have more cousins still living and well! Unfortunately, your book is out of print! Is there any way we can obtain that? Please don't put this on line as we the cousins are trying to locate you! :-) We are surely proud of your accomplishment for writing this book we want to read. We would love to know more about our descendents despite the history that happened. Thank you so much, Harry from your long lost cousin, LESLIE of Granada Hills, CA born in Buffalo, NY in 1948 daughter of Morris and Ina Hoffman (both still living).



2. While I know that genealogy searching can be difficult, please share this information where it will do the most good: with the author. As a Librarian, I depend on the kind of informative, concise, and relevant reviews that are shared on a regular basis by those kind souls who have actually read the book in question. Not having read the book, my stars are simply there so that I could post the messege. Thank you



3. I couldn't put this book down and didn't want it to end. Harry could easily write a sequel to this book of how he transitioned into American life. This book is very easy reading and insightful of the atrocities that happened in Lithuania. Harry I admire you.



4. Although this book is not of high quality literary-wise, it is very interesting. As a reader you get a realistic glimpse of how life in the Lithuanan Jewish gettho's was during WWII. I was shocked to find out that not only Germans, but Lithuanians and Poles too were involved in mass-killings of innocent people. 'The shadow of death' is a very suitbale titel, because that is exactly how the jewish people must have felt: living in the shadow of death.

No comments about Remembering Anna Akhmatova.

2 comments about Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism.

1. At best it describes the relationships within Ha'am's life as reflective of his peculiar ideological formulations without. At least that is what I found to be most interesting. At the least it was a truthful account of certain trends within Asher Ginzberg's intellectual life. Still, the author didn't fully address the fundamental yet implicit drives/reactions that animated Ha'am; namely, civilizationalism, evolution, utopia- anti.utopia...Asher didn't merely "want out" of russia (or later as he found out, europe) for pragmatic reasons, he instead pursued an idea far ahead of his time: civilizational sovereignty, a thorough break I think with nation-state building that reigned and still does in most of the world today. Still this work does further a discussion, and I thank the author for writing it.



2. This is definitely a five-star book: an exemplary intellectual and cultural history of an underexamined figure in early Zionism. I do think that the editorial reviews above, and the reader review below, do misrepresent the importance of the book in certain ways. Ahad Ha'am (or "One of the People"---"Ha'am" is not and cannot be used as if a last name as below!) was a central figure in early Zionism, and yet represents a strand of "cultural" or "spiritual" Zionism opposed to the political tactics and image of a polis in Zion represented by Herzl. Herzl won. It is important to note not only the ways that Ahad Ha'am influenced today's Zionism, but also to identify in him an idealistic, spiritually rich, and above all tolerant and inclusive vision of Zionism that has since been lost. All of this comes through in this marvelous book. I also handle these themes in my recent book _Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siecle_: Ahad Ha'am and Martin Buber were especially influential in Kafka's Prague.

5 comments about The Division Street Princess: A Memoir.

1. The book brought back so many memories from the old neichborhood. It is a good book for all ages.



2. Author Elaine Soloway remembers Chicago in the 'forties as the best of times and the worst of times. Now in her sixties, she presents an unvarnished, microscopically precise yet warm and loving account of growing up in a supportive Jewish family above her family owned mom and pop grocery story in Chicago's Humboldt Park.
   
   The author remembers/reconstructs every detail--how her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors spoke, dressed, worried, loved, and argued--as the world of their Jewish enclave was dissolved by the drip, drip, drip of postwar mobility. She notes, "Television, suburban backyards, and supermarkets were draining our close-knit block of its friendliness, its familiarity."
   
   Soloway's excellently written account will bring back the past for those of us who shared the same time and place. For those who did not, it will serve as a valued lesson on how we got from Chicago in the 'forties to the Chicago of today and what we gained and at what cost.
   
   --Lowell Streiker
   author of The Old Neighborhood: Memories of a Chicago Childhood--1942 to 1952.



3. I was drawn into this wonderful book by the details of daily life in 1942 as seen, in the first pages, through the eyes of a four-year-old child. And I stayed with delight to absorb that little girl's increasingly acute awareness of family, friends, neighbors, and the urban neighborhood itself, as she grew into her early teens. The way in which the reader comes to know and ultimately care deeply about the parents, Min and Irv Shapiro, and the future of the family is especially satisfying. While the time and the place are unique, I believe that everyone of any age will find something familiar in this lovely memoir.



4. I read Divison Street Princess and loved every page. SOloway writes wonderfully, and evokes a certain America magically, she has created a very important memoir.
   
   I feel the book is so important in Americana culture and Jewish-Americana cultural archives, that the book should eventually be entered onto an online Internet site, free of charge, so that readers in the future, and I mean the FUTURE, like 500 years from now, can also read this moving memoir! Also, this would make a great movie in the Barry Levinson vein of Hollywoodiana. The murder of the little girl and the arrest of the murderer would make a fantastic 1950s Chicago movie story, with Soloway's memoir bookending the movie on both sides.



5. I have to echo all the other five star reviews here, added by Soloways or not. This is a well-written, engaging, moving story of a child's life growing up in Chicago. I read it in one gulp.

No comments about Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain.

2 comments about Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Stages).

1. This is a slim volume from a French philosopher writing of her childhood as a Jew in France during World War II. She writes from the perspective of an adult who clearly still is ill-at-ease with her history, specifically her choosing of a Christian woman who help hide her over her mother; her violation of Jewish law taught her by her rabbi father. This volume does not speak to common experience, not even French Jewish experience; rather it is the experience of Sarah Kofman as seen in retrospect. What is most evident is the lack of resolution regarding her past - the reader appreciates the difficulty with which she apparently tells her story.



2. I am aware of many authors who died voluntarily. The hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Nietzsche's birth on October 15, 1994, will have special significance for me as being the date of Sarah Kofman's death. Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, an autobiographical account of her childhood, was written shortly before Sarah Kofman was sixty years old. It is easy for me to be impressed by Sarah Kofman because she was a woman who seemed to be interested in the same kind of gag reflex humor that appeals to me.
   
   Certain social situations demand silence about certain things. When the Republicans were coming to Saint Paul (an attempt to put lipstick on a pig's eye) for their convention, I realized that the police in Saint Paul would not want them to hear me shouting my opinions about tax cuts, war, and a ten trillion dollar national debt which is rolling in money in the wrong direction. I split, left town, and tried to crack myself up from a distance. Now that I'm back, and Sarah Palin has become the ideal joke vehicle for the things that Republicans enjoy mocking (like WHY IS THIS MAN LAUGHING? Nixon running for Vice President with Ike in 1952), it is easier for me to be open about Sarah Kofman being the hot white chick philosophy expert in Freud and Nietzsche for France during my lifetime, because she had the kind of familiarity with ultimate issues that World War II made an impression on Jews in Europe that will never quit.
   
   The gag reflex is the ultimate contrast to the kind of piffle that praise for an old goat with America first policies is standing for as the national debt jumps from ten trillion dollars to twelve trillion dollars in the immediate future. Sarah Kofman could be nasty by telling how Rabbi Bereck Kofman was beaten to death in Aushwitz because, instead of working, he wanted to spend the Sabboth praying for everyone on all sides. Religion is a hell of a context in that kind of world, and old goats don't make it much better.

4 comments about The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction.

1. This small book covers an enormous range of subjects. Chasidic life in a shtetyl, the Holocaust, conflict within the Jewish institutions of higher learning in post war America, the personal psychological impact of being a Holocaust survivor, and the various modes of Talmudic scholarship - Halivin's great accomplishment is to bring meaning to this wide spectrum of topics in few words. This is a book by a serious thinker who is not afraid to risk revealing his innermost feelings and conflicts. A courageous work



2. Halivni's book will not satisfy those looking for a Holocaust memoir. He is not a professional Holocaust survivor or bad novelist like Elie Wiesel. Rather he is a scholar. He started out as a child prodigy in Talmud, but never had a chance to attend a real yeshiva. After the war he turned down such opportunities to get a doctorate in philosophy and develop academic textual criticism of the Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was a very big fish at JTS, but the water turned rancid when they abandoned Jewish law in favor of feminist correctness. He then went to Columbia University, but now every major university offers doctorates in Talmud.

   He makes a heartbreaking admission to us at one point. He says he cannot transmit the highest level of his methodology to his students. I would like to be charitable to so long-suffering a man, but doesn't it mean he has failed? What use is a method that exists only in his own head?

   Although he never says so, I'm afraid Halivni realized at some point he was not an adult prodigy. If he went to Lakewood with Rav Kotler or Yeshiva University with Rav Soloveitchik he would never have been among the first rank of scholars. He admits to the sin of envy, and that shortcoming drove him to isolation and failure. That, not Auschwitz, is the true tragedy of his life.




3. As another reviewer wrote, this is not just a Holocaust memoir. Halivni writes about his Holocuast experiences, but many others have done the same at greater length. What I got out of this book was:

   1. His discussion of pre-Holocuast shtetl life: its scholarship, its isolation, its sheer backwardness in many areas (for example, when one relative told the author's grandfather that the boy was "turning modern" because he ate with a fork instead of with his hands, and read secular newspapers). Unless you eat with your hands and avoid newspapers, you will find it much harder after reading this book to believe that Jews should be bound by every custom of their ancestors.

   2. His attempt to describe his own ideological position: more respectful of traditional halakhah than modern Conservatives, more critical of traditional interpretations than some Orthodox commentators. You can find plenty of books by commentators to Halivni's right, and plenty by commentators to his left, but I would be surprised if you could find any by people who think exactly what he thinks (assuming there are any). As a result, his book is unique or nearly so - and for this reason alone, his book is worth reading and will probably challenge you whatever your views.

   Another reviewer said that Halivni is not among the "first rank" of scholars. (I am not enough of a scholar to intelligently agree or disagree). But even if this were the case, I would recommend this book. I've learned quite a bit from people who weren't in the "first rank" of scholars - many of whom, I suspect, are not of Halivni's rank.




4. Prior to reading this book, I was curious about Rabbi Weiss Halivni. What kind of man, I wondered, would stand up against the left wing of the Conservative movement, at the potential cost of his own career? In reading this book, I have been richly rewarded with an understanding of him. Rabbi Weiss Halivni is searchingly honest, even brave in his degree of self-revelation, as he describes his life in a backward village in Hungary in the lead-up to the Second World War, the troubled psychological dynamics of his family, most of whom were subsequently murdered by the Nazis, his experiences in the death camps, and the course of his career in the United States as a scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary and then Columbia. He explains the origins and process of his style of Talmudic analysis; an unusual blend of the traditional and the critical analytic methods, coming in part from his grandfather, but also a product of modern scholarship. He laments that he's been unsuccessful in fostering it in his students (they find it too difficult I think).
   
   But it is his self-analysis if his own character, his simultanously anxiety-ridden and courageous life, that makes this such worthwhile reading. I think that he is just not afraid to be different, and he values honesty more than most; his stance on preserving halachah in the face of tremendous pressure from liberal "progressives" at the JTS is one outcome of these traits.
   
   [...]

2 comments about The Martyr: Luis de Carvajal, A Secret Jew in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Jewish Latin America).

1. The archives of the inquisition have been preserved in Mexico, including detailed testimony recounting actual conversations. The book reads like a novel but it's history. Cohen must have been truly obsessed in order to do the research and write such a book. It's a compelling read.



2. The book is very interesting and gives a historical jewish perspective in New Spain during the late 1500's. I became interested in the book because my ancestor Juan Ramirez probably emigrated with Luis Carvajal (Conquistador) in 1580.