An intriguing, scholarly memoir of being a woman and studying the Talmud that will appeal most to those deeply interested in...
Gleaning wisdom from the Talmud during a time of personal crisis.
When Kurshan, who has worked in publishing as an editor, translator, and foreign rights representative, left her job and home in New York City to follow her new husband to Jerusalem, she never imagined she'd be divorced in a year's time. With only a few friends, she was unsure of what to do with herself until a friend suggested she adopt the practice of daf yomi: reading a page a day of the Talmud. Undaunted by the idea that it would take more than seven years to complete the full text on Jewish law, Kurshan dove in, embracing each day and reading with an open mind. What she discovered was invigorating, exciting, and challenging as she worked her way through a text geared primarily for the male half of the Jewish population. She also found that the commitment to follow daf yomi connected her to a worldwide network of people also following the same practice; all participants used a schedule set up by a rabbi in 1923 so that everyone would literally be on the same page on the same day. Kurshan expertly incorporates quotes from the Talmud in her reflections on the various arguments and the important events in her life that she recorded in a journal as she progressed. Readers witness the sinuous progression of her devotion and her movement into a new marriage and the births of her children as the seven-plus years unfold. Though the author claims one doesn't need to be Jewish or even religious to study the Talmud, a basic understanding of Judaism, the customs, and important religious holidays would be useful to anyone reading Kurshan's memoir.
An intriguing, scholarly memoir of being a woman and studying the Talmud that will appeal most to those deeply interested in Judaism.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12126-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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