Beautifully written memories of a youth filled with literature, language, family, friendship, love, lust and a place that is...
Judaism, community, friendship, love, Farhoud, and above all, reading and writing, form the core of Kattan’s vibrant telling of his upbringing in Jewish Baghdad during the mid-20th century.
The book is infused with vivid descriptions of the people and places the author, born in 1928, encountered from his school-age years through young adulthood and up until his departure for France in 1947. Some of his most reverential, emotional and poignant language is reserved for the recounting of his exposure to world literature and foreign languages and his relationship with Baghdad’s active literary community, which began to seriously develop when Kattan was only 13. At the same time, he movingly evokes the terror and transformative effects of the destructive and deadly May 1941 attacks against the Jews of Baghdad, which were at least in part fueled by the snowballing Nazi destruction of European Jewry. Until this Farhoud, Iraqi Jews had long lived in relative harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors, a peace that has not been restored since. As a teenager already emerging as a successful writer, Kattan navigated cultural divides. But while he was accepted by both Arabic and Jewish presses, he remained painfully aware of the possible repercussions of speaking in a Jewish dialect in Baghdad. The book functions as a loving homage to a time and community that has since virtually disappeared. It is written in tones that convey the wonderment, yearnings and joys of a boy who, in becoming a young man, discovers the meaning of deepening friendships, the first stirrings and fumbling pursuits of love and desire and the beauty of learning to read fluently in Arabic and French.
Beautifully written memories of a youth filled with literature, language, family, friendship, love, lust and a place that is no more.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55192-799-3
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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