For readers unfamiliar with Yiddish writing, a revelation; for readers and aficionados of the language, a treasure.
A wide-ranging, eclectic anthology of work by Yiddish writers.
Stavans (Humanities, Latin American, and Latino Culture/Amherst Coll.; The Seventh Heaven: Travels Through Jewish Latin America, 2019, etc.) and Yiddish Book Center academic director Lambert (American Literature/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, 2014, etc.) have assembled an impressive collection of essays, fiction, drama, memoir, poetry, cartoons, and interviews, all showing how “Yiddish is so deeply woven into the fabric of the United States that it can sometimes be difficult to recognize how much it has transformed the world we live in today.” Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, the pieces are, in some cases, written by names that general readers will recognize: Irving Howe, Emma Goldman, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Allen Ginsberg, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Michael Chabon, Alan Alda, Leonard Nimoy, and Elliott Gould. Others will be news to many readers—and mostly good news. The editors provide a brief introduction to each major division of the text and to each contributor. The arrangement of the text is sensible, and the editors show us that American Yiddish writing expands well beyond the United States; they include pieces from Canada, Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico. Among all these are some stunners—e.g., “Oedipus in Brooklyn,” a story by Blume Lempel (1907-1999) that begins with the line, “Sylvia was no Jocasta.” Emma Goldman (1869-1940) writes fiercely about marriage, which she compares to an “iron yoke.” In a poem about Coney Island, Victor Packer (1897-1958) writes, “Beauty and crudity / Go hand in hand and / Launch a united front / Right there on the sand.” Ozick (b. 1928) compares Sholem Aleichem to Dickens, Twain, and Will Rogers. “He was a popular presence, and stupendously so. His lectures and readings were mobbed; he was a household friend; he was cherished as a family valuable.”
For readers unfamiliar with Yiddish writing, a revelation; for readers and aficionados of the language, a treasure.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63206-262-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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