A readable, provocative rejoinder to Tom Segev’s 1967, Gershom Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire and other recent works on...
Must one be Zionist to be Israeli, or even Jewish? Historian Brecher, former director of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, ponders the question.
The author, born in Tel Aviv but long resident in his parents’ native Germany, returned to Israel in the 1960s. In Germany, he writes, “most parents of the Jewish children I grew up with made do with abstract, summary remarks when their experiences during the persecution came up.” In Israel, conversely, his historian colleagues “wanted to steer me out of the darkness and confusion of the Diaspora” and urged him to embrace a vision of a Jewish people living in a secular culture in which they were neither oppressed nor assimilated, or assimilated to the extent that its members were “new Jews,” namely Israelis, ethnically dominant in a country of their own. “How could I, as a German Jew, accept such a nationalistic principle of nation and nationality?” writes Brecher. He could not, it develops, for he became convinced that such status was possible only at the expense of the land’s Arab inhabitants. Though surrounded by 100 million Arabs, he urges, Israel is the Goliath of lore, a modern industrial nation with a powerful army set against corrupt and ineffectual countries that could not manage even to feed their own people. His views earned him enemies and cost him a certain amount of influence in his work as a military historian, but, as he writes in this combination of memoir and history, he pressed his case as a lecturer and as an activist in the nascent Israeli peace movement. Only when Israeli society acknowledges the injustices the nation has committed, he concludes, will that peace be possible, though “this is predicated on a political maturity . . . that is not yet in evidence.”
A readable, provocative rejoinder to Tom Segev’s 1967, Gershom Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire and other recent works on modern Israel.Pub Date: July 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59051-211-1
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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