5 comments about Looking for Lost Bird: A Jewish Woman Discovers Her Navajo Roots.

1. Like many of the readers I couldn't put the book down until I read it from cover to cover. While reading the story I found out these people were my extended family! I know everyone mentioned in the book. As a youngster I remember the crusade of Aunt Desbah, Uncle John and others in finding the twins who were stolen as babies. I wept at the end when Yvette participated in the holy Hozhoji ceremony to be reunited with her birth place, family, culture, and environment. Very moving!

   Aunt Betty, Yvette's biological mother lived a very brave life as she longed and searched everyday of her life wanting to be reunited with her twins. May God bless her soul.




2. Looking For Lost Bird:
   A Jewish Woman Discovers Her Navajo Roots.
   Yvette Melanson with Claire Safron
   Bard Books. 233 pages. $22.00
   By Elliot Fein

   Looking For Lost Bird is a true story that is disturbing yet compelling. A Native American Navajo Indian woman gives birth on her reservation home in Arizona to twins, a girl and a boy. During their infancy, both children get sick. The mother takes the children to the nearest local hospital for a diagnosis.

   Hospital staff members instruct her that they will need to keep the two children over night for observations. When the mother returns the next day, the children are gone. The hospital has no record that they were ever admitted.

   The kidnapped infant children are each adopted in Florida by two different families. One of the families is a young Jewish couple that lives in a New York City suburb. Looking for Lost Bird is the story of the Navajo girl, Yvette Melanson, who is raised in that Jewish household.

   As an adult, Melanson discovers her Navajo origins and searches for her family roots. She finds her family (minus her mother, who died of a broken heart grieving for two lost children) still living on the Navajo reservation in which she was born. At the age of forty-three, Melanson decides first to visit her birth family in Arizona, then to move there permanently with her husband and two children.

   While adjusting to the reservation, Melanson learns and begins practicing the religion, culture, and way of life of her birth family. In this process, she abandons many of the Jewish cultural practices (but not necessarily Jewish values) in which she was raised.

   Melanson's Jewish parents (particularly her mother) provide a loving and caring environment for their daughter. In Yvette's recollection of how she was raised, their warts do surface, particularly the shortcomings of her father. After her mother becomes ill and eventually dies during her teen years, the father changes into a different, less appealing character.

   Melanson never reveals whether her Jewish parents knew about her Navajo origins. The reader is left to speculate whether the knowledge, if known by her Jewish parents that she was stolen from a Native American Indian family would have impacted their decision to adopt.

   What is surprising in the telling of this life story is the absence of any form of anti-Semitism by the author. When Melanson writes critically about her mother and father, she writes about them as individuals. She does not associate her criticism of them with Judaism as a faith tradition.

   On the reservation, when she begins taking on Native American Indian ways, Melanson naturally compares Navajo culture to Judaism. In this comparison, Melanson writes with respect, affection, and even admiration about the religious tradition in which she was raised.

   Melanson tells her life story (with the help of Claire Safron) with compassion, humor, and eloquence.

   I recently led a book club at my synagogue. A member of the club recommended that I read Looking for Lost Bird. After reading it, we immediately decided to include Looking for Lost Bird one of our featured selections. The book provides a great opportunity to learn about Navajo culture and to see how it compares to Judaism as a religious tradition. The book is also a true gift for adopted individuals, particularly native American Indians, seeking to uncover their past.

   Elliot Fein teaches Jewish Studies in the Tarbut V'Torah School in Irvine.




3. I look through thousands of books a year as a reseller, but I read about 2 books a year. This one got my attention because I have a son who is 1/2 Navajo. His mother suffered the same sort of fate as Yvette. "voluntarily" seperated from brothers and sisters at the age of 5, sent to Utah, a mom she has not met, alcohol, violence etc etc etc . . .
   
   This book does a very good job of relating what rez life is really like, and gives a good insight into Navajo culture.
   
   I am a classically stoic, but I had tears in my eyes all the way through this book. I encourage anyone who is interested in the journey of the Navajo to spend some time on the reservation. Drive around, meet the people. Western culture has a lot to learn from this society.
   
   Read Ward Churchill's writings too, don't judge him by what the media has said about him.



4. This is an amazing and detailed story - and I don't want to spoil it for anyone who has not read it - suffice it to say that 'discovering ones roots' is neither an easy nor a direct path to tread - the brave people who undertake this quest never cease to amaze me .......



5. The book came and it was like new--maybe it was new. I thought it took a bit longer to get to me than usual, and, if so, it's no big deal

No comments about The Jerusalem Problem: The Struggle for Permanent Status.

No comments about In The Garden of Memory: A Family Memoir.

5 comments about The Iron Furnace: A Holocaust Survivor's Story.

1. George Topas' memoir begins with his testimony before a German court in Kiel against a SS guard. This event triggers his memory of his five years under the Nazi boot. He relates life before the war in Warsaw, the Warsaw Ghetto and Uprising, deportation and life in a number of concentration camps. Mr. Topas is a trained historian and he provides the reader with historial asides and explanations. He goes into the false assumptions Jews had before and during World WarII. The writer provides a number of footnotes, includes an index and wraps up his narrative with an long epilogue which tell what happened to characters introduced in the book. This is a mature learned memoir.



2. Reading "The Iron Furnace: A Holocaust Survivor's Story," you experience practically the entire repertoire of human emotions. In January 1939, the author was a 15-year-old Jewish boy living in Warsaw. When the Nazis invaded Poland, they turned his and his family's lives upside down. His schooling ended, he and his family were interned in the Warsaw ghetto (except for George's stays in two German work camps), and then they were all shipped to various concentration camps. George was the only one in his immediate family to survive. After his liberation by the U.S. Army, he volunteered to serve (without pay) in that army and did so with distinction. He then went on to lead a rich, productive life.

   The reader feels horror, revulsion and fury at the hideous acts of the oppressors, described in chilling detail; admiration for the courage, intelligence and quick wits displayed by the author; deep sorrow at the sad plights of so many; wry enjoyment of the black humor that appeared even in the direst of circumstances; respect for the author's prodigious memory for events, conversations and people (whom you come to know intimately in these pages); awe at his ability to retain his religious faith throughout his journeys into Hell; inspiration at the demonstrated indomitability of the human spirit; jubilation at the author's rich subsequent life; and gratitude to this historian for having given his testimony so powerfully that it has to silence anyone who dares to deny that the Holocaust took place.




3. The book is unique among survivor's stories that I have read for its clear, straightforward writing style. The story, while frightening, is told in a mannner that does not terrorize the reader; this book should therefore appeal to a wide audience. The author's survival of these events is as surprising to us as it was to him, and marks with compassion the many of his fellow men and women that did not survive those awful events. His subsequent enlistment in the US Army is a heartening testament to human stamina and determination. Bravo!



4. This book is both brilliant and hideous. It is brilliant in its clarity and writing style; it is hideous in the unfortunately all-too-true events that it depicts. This book tells the story of the author's life from the outset of the Nazi domination of Poland until the eventual liberation 6 long years later. It is a story told in a deceptively simple style, eminently readable, revealing beneath the horrible picture of what evil truly is. It is a book that everyone, whether a student of history, humankind or good and evil, should read. The author comes across as a remarkable man. And this is a remarkable book.



5. This book is both brilliant and hideous. It is brilliant in its clarity and writing style; it is hideous in the unfortunately all-too-true events that it depicts. This book tells the story of the author's life from the outset of the Nazi domination of Poland until the eventual liberation 6 long years later. It is a story told in a deceptively simple style, eminently readable, revealing beneath the horrible picture of what evil truly is. It is a book that everyone, whether a student of history, humankind or good and evil, should read. The author comes across as a remarkable man. And this is a remarkable book.

1 comments about If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew.

1. As any anti-Zionist knows, raising opposition to Israel and Zionism immediately draws accusations of anti-Semitism, or if the dissenter is Jewish, accusations of self-hatred.
   
   It is precisely these attempts by Zionism to squash all criticism of Israel -- especially criticism by Jews -- that Mike Marqusee takes head on in his latest book, If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew. Starting with the papers of his late grandfather and Marqusee's own personal experiences being raised as a Jew in post-war America, the book beautifully weaves together a broad, yet intimately personal, history of anti-Zionism and radicalism in Judaism. Equal parts biography, autobiography, history, and commentary, Marqusee powerfully strips Zionism of its fundamental claim to represent and speak for all of world Jewry.
   
   Central to Marqusee's task is the re-appropriation of Jewish, anti-Zionist, and leftist history -- a history that is consciously buried by the Zionist establishment. In this process, he shows the strong connections between history, how we understand the present, and the frameworks we can utilize in determining the future.
   
   Marqusee weighs in on an impressively diverse and rich array of subjects including (but far from limited to) the Jewish workers' Bund, Jewish Enlightenment philosophy, political struggles within the New Deal coalition, the parallels between Zionism and right-wing Hindu nationalism, "left-wing anti-Semitism," discussions with Muslims about Zionism, Jews in the Middle East, and the parallels between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
   
   These discussions and explorations all radiate out from Marqusee's narrative center: the life of his maternal grandfather -- Edward V. Morand (aka EVM) -- a Jewish leftist active in New York politics in the 1930s and 1940s.
   
   Despite being involved in virtually every left-wing cause of his time, EVM increasingly became an ardent Zionist -- forcing him to unconsciously sacrifice many of his radical principles. Marqusee is particularly horrified by EVM's political positions in 1948 -- the year of Israeli "independence", or al-Nakba (the catastrophe), as it's known to Palestinians. Marqusee writes: "In the midst of [Israel's] one-way process of destruction, displacement and plunder, EVM's constant cry is 'no retreat.' He seems to have entirely lost his former distaste for war and militarism...In this war, there seems to be only one kind of victim, Jewish."
   
   Marqusee attributes EVM's political twists and turns, in part, to "[a] failure to imagine the people on the receiving end of your dreams. It's a failure rooted in Western and white supremacy, a network of unexamined assumptions that has proved much more ineradicable and insidious than anti-semitism. EVM's writings of 1948 resound with it, and offer inadvertent testimony to the racist character of the Nakba and Nakba denial."
   
   These political contradictions and hypocrisies are exactly what led Marqusee himself out of the Zionist trap.
   
   In a very candid section, Marqusee relates an experience that is no doubt familiar to many Jewish anti-Zionists: the first time he was accused of self-hatred. He describes hearing an Israeli soldier speak to his Sunday school class just after the 1967 Israeli war that began the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The soldier was going on about how "the Arabs are better off now, under Israeli rule. You have to understand these are ignorant people. They go to the toilet in the street." Marqusee responds: "Now something akin to this I had heard before. I had heard it from the white Southerners I'd been taught to look down upon. I had heard it from people my parents and my teachers described as prejudiced and bigoted. So I raised my hand and when called upon I expressed my opinion, as I'd been taught to do. It seemed to me that what our visitor had said was, well, racist." The young Marqusee was immediately denounced. Angrily, he went home to share this experience with his normally supportive parents. At the dinner table, he added to the story, putting forward his opinion, heavily influenced by the anti-Vietnam War movement, that, "'It was wrong for one country to take over another, or part of another, by military force'...Suddenly [my dad] barked, 'Enough already!'...Like my Sunday school teacher, he made me feel that I'd said something obscene...'I think you need to look at why you're saying what you're saying,' he said...'There's some Jewish self-hatred there.'"
   
   In the end, Marqusee answers the question set out by the title, "'If I am not for myself...', then others will claim to be 'for me'...[I]n defining myself as an anti-Zionist Jew, I am for myself, and at the same time and without contradiction for others...I find in anti-Zionism emancipation both as a Jew and as a human being...Jews today can no more escape the question of Zionism than they could the question of anti-semitism in earlier eras. The problem today isn't that Jews are in denial of their Jewishness or of the threat of anti-semitism, but that Jews are in denial about Israel, Zionism, the Nakba, the occupation, the wall...The people who call us self-haters want to steal our selves from us -- appropriate our selves for their cause -- and speaking as a self, I'm damned if I'm going to let them get away with it."
   
   The task of anti-Zionists is to explain the role that Zionism serves in the US imperial project while also breaking the notion that Zionism has anything to do with Jewishness. As Marqusee puts it: "[T]he Zionist dominance of the diaspora, and especially the diaspora in America, is a mutable, historical phenomenon -- not the inevitable expression of 'Jewish self-interest' -- and the continuation of that dominance is by no means guaranteed."
   
   Easier said than done, right? In addition to reclaiming history, we have to understand that Israeli war crimes and the logic of Zionism itself can shake even the most veteran of Zionists. Just look at Marqusee's dad's own development -- the same dad that first called him a self-hater: "[I]n the end, the Zionists tested his humanity beyond endurance. After the news broke about the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, he phoned me from New York. 'Ok,' he said, 'you were right. They're bastards.' He started to make contributions to Palestinian causes and to raise the issue among his friends."
   
   The struggle against Zionism's dominance over Jews and Palestinians won't be easy, but Marqusee has made an important and captivating contribution to that fight. If you've ever had trouble arguing that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism or if you just want to get a sense of the rich diversity of Jewish history and its relationship to radicalism, then you should pick up this book. I just bought a copy for my dad -- the first person to call me a self-hater. If Marqusee can convince his dad, then I guess I'll hold out hope for mine as well.

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 Times Square Rabbi: Finding the Hope in Lost Kids' Lives.

1. The message Yehudah Fine brings to parents and teens in his book is that even when a teenager's life is in crisis, caring can produce profound transformation. The author's unique street experiences opened up a window into the world of disconnected teens. Fine's message should resonate in every home.



2. I never thought I would read a heart pounding thriller based on a real life rabbi and gripping inspirational tales from the street. Want to learn about life after midnight in NYC, then read this book.It reads like a novel and yet is a true tale of NYC street life. Why this book is not a bestseller is beyond me. This is a powerful book that features true to life stories of teens caught in the web of drugs, prostitution, family violence and world that does not care. In that world walks Yehudah Fine, a real time hero whose human side is so real and vivid you feel after reading the stories in his book that you know him and the kids who he loves and cares about.This is a one of a kind read that will give you hope springing from the darkness forever. It will inspire you and make you cry.



3. Special News: For all of you who have enjoyed reading Yehudah's book, Times Square Rabbi-Finding The Hope In Lost Kids' Lives (Hazelden) there is some exciting news. Yehudah just signed a movie/tv rights contract for his book. Pamela Hayden, one of the voice stars of the TV show, the Simpsons, purchased the rights to his book.



4. "Religion is for people who wish to avoid going to hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there." So wrote Abraham Twerski, founder of Gateway Rehabilitation Center, in his cover blub for Yehudah Fine's book, "Time Square Rabbi." Rabbi Fine (who prefers to be called "Yehudah") has that rare balance of religion and spirituality, combined with a down-to-earth love of sports, music, and life itself, that enables him to reach lost teenagers on the mean streets of New York.

   His writing style is clear and poignant, combining good descriptive details with well-written dialogues. Each story illustrates one of the 8 steps in a recovery program that Yehudah has developed, based on the writings of Maimonides. Although the characters and stories are composites (to protect the kids' privacy), they are so well done that they virtually leap off the page.

   Every parent should read this book. Yehudah pulls no punches about how these kids ended up on the streets. For many, it was an escape from unbearable home situations. In other cases, the parents kicked their kids out of the house with no idea what would happen to them out there. In still other cases, kids from "good homes" set out with high hopes and unrealistic fantasies, only to be victimized by the predators that roam "The Way Beyond." That's Yehudah's name for the street culture that exists in the same physical space as up-scale Manhattan, but in a different world entirely. Like real life, some of these stories have happy endings, others do not. But all of them will make you think. As the subtitle says, this is a book about finding hope.




5. Had I not fallen, I would not have risen
   had I not sat in darkness,
   God would not have been a light for me.
   ~Midrash Tehillim Socher Tov, Psalm 5
   
   Yehudah Fine is The Times Square Rabbi who can now be found spreading his message of hope on radio shows and in nationwide seminars. He works as a family therapist and lecturer and continues to share his wisdom with parents and teens across the country.
   
   Finding the Hope in Lost Kids' Lives is the story of eight kids involved in the street culture in New York City's Times Square. Through the example of eight lives, he explores eight steps towards spiritual renewal. These stories can be read by anyone to encourage their own awakening and to give a pathway to hope for anyone trying to climb out of their own painful situation.
   
   "While change at a profound level is rare on the street, nevertheless it does happen. And when you witness such a change, first was darkness and then came the light." ~pg. 4
   
   You don't need to live on the street to hit an all time low in your life but the gritty lifestyles these kids lead exposes them to a world of danger and vulnerability. The first step in this book begins when the pain of life has become unbearable. An analysis of action follows along with a renewal in self-esteem. As the stories progress we witness a separation from an old way of living in order to embrace a new life. There are sad and happy endings, but all have a profound message of love and compassion.
   
   ~The Rebecca Review

1 comments about My Einstein (Vintage).

1. This collection of essays shows that science is a great conversation (as the writer John Gardner once said of literature). Contributors include scientists and science writers. Since each of the essays was written from a unique perspective, there is no dominant theme, but as a collection they celebrate Einstein's independence and generosity of spirit as well as his brilliance. The book helps non-scientists appreciate the continuing impact of Einstein's work and Einstein's working methods on the physics and physicists of today.

No comments about Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor,s Son: Book I-In Kasrilovka.

2 comments about Strangers No More: One Family's Exceptional Journey from Christianity to Judaism.

1. This book takes you on a journey in more ways than one. Shlomo Burnell recounts his life in Finland from the time he entered the Church as a minister, through the growth of his family, their move to Austrailia and finally to Israel. But the real journey is the spiritual one. From an early acceptance of Church doctrine through questioning and seeking and finally coming to realize the spiritual truth of Judaism, the Burnell family's journey was like riding a whirlwind.
   I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to find the truth.



2. This was a very touching story of the journey to a new belief and the determination to follow it. Every step this family took was heavy with consequences and life changes that one could not go back on. But with determination and a strong faith, they are now part of the community of the Children of Israel.