An absorbing, well-told story of Jewish achievement that is a pleasure to read.
How adversity shaped a century of Jewish creativity and invention.
“A Jew is like a man with a short arm,” said the composer Gustav Mahler. “He has to swim harder to reach the shore.” In this beautifully crafted work, music historian and novelist Lebrecht (Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World, 2010, etc.) argues convincingly that “existential angst”—a dread of losing their rights to citizenship and free speech amid widespread persecution—freed many Jews to pursue unusual accomplishments with abandon. Not expecting acceptance, “free to think the unthinkable,” Freud, Proust, Einstein, and others worked brilliantly in such fields as science, art, and music, not because of any genetic advantage but out of opportunity made possible by “marginality.” With anxiety as a “primary motivating factor, the engine of fresh thinking,” they began in the mid-19th century, and especially in the decade after the Dreyfus Affair, to engage in acts of genius. Such individuals as Marx and Disraeli set the tone for “a century of Jewish invention,” unafraid of criticism from those in power. They paved the way for diverse successors, as well, including Trotsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Jonas Salk, and through to Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg. Taking us into many spheres of endeavor, Lebrecht offers revealing portraits of and stories about these Jews, practicing and not, as they crossed artistic boundaries, advanced science, and reshaped myriad aspects of Western society in the period through the 1947 founding of Israel. He provides nuanced explorations of individuals from Einstein, “a religious man of no religion, a perfect Jewish paradox,” to Kafka, who knows “something terrible is about to happen and there is nothing anyone can do about it.” Written with passion and authority, this book shows how these great minds always took a different point of view—and changed how we see the world. Lebrecht also includes a helpful glossary of Jewish terms.
An absorbing, well-told story of Jewish achievement that is a pleasure to read.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3422-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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