4 comments about So Strange My Path: A Spiritual Pilgrimage.

1. Abraham Carmel's story is truly inspirational. It reminds us that our priorities in life today are so misdirected. This man had one goal that he centered his life on: Finding a religion that he could flourish with, and that did not leave him full of doubt and contradiction. Like other reviewers, I had the privilege of being a student of Mr. Carmel (of blessed memory), but I knew little of his journey until I read this amazing book.



2. A convoluted and strange path indeed.

   Mr. Carmel, of blessed memory found his spritual home in a most unlikely place, and only after diligent search and much discouragement: from his family, his colleagues, and for quite some time, from the community he sought to join. He found joy and contentment as a high school English teacher. To hear Shakespeare from his mouth was an experience, but to be privileged to have known him well and to have been one of his students was a singular honor. Shunned for the most part by his family, he never married; his funeral was so large that traffic and bus lines had to be diverted for the crowd that assembled outside the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School. Such was the measure of the love his students and his adopted People had for him.
   A remarkable man.
   May his memory be for a blessing.




3. In the process of finding my way from the Episcopal Church to life as a Jew, this is one of the most power things that I read and re-read. It gives one an idea of where to go when the idea that Jesus was God incarnate no longer holds. I have recommended this book to everyone I have met on the path to conversion, and others with crises of faith, for over 25 years. It is still one of my most beloved books.



4. The story of Mr. Carmel's spiritual journey is very worthwhile reading. His strange path from Anglican priest, to Roman Catholic priest and subsequent conversion to Judaism is well told. His modest, gentle and generous nature will come through to any reader. Plus it's very well written. After all he spent the latter part of his life as an English teacher.

   I had the priviledge of meeting this wonderful gentleman, may he rest in peace. I approached him, and got to know him, because I found his story fascinating. Unfortunately he retired from teaching at my high school before I could formally become his student.

5 comments about Finding a Home for the Soul: Interviews with Converts to Judaism.

1. I bring no background knowledge to the matter of conversions to Judaism, so this book helped me to understand a bit about this topic. I read "Finding a Home for the Soul" as a consequence of meeting the author, a wonderful, engaging woman.
   
   As a Roman Catholic, I was most intrigued with descriptions of those Catholics who simply never warmed up to "Jesus" as Messiah and wandered into the orbit of Judaism because of a greater comfort with the notion of one God the Father (excuse me if I am mangling this concept).
   
   My specialty is more the arena of intercultural romance, which "Finding a Home for the Soul" indirectly addresses, as many of these conversions (but not all) occurred as a result of a mixed marriage.
   
   Also intriguing to me are the descriptions of important rituals in the Jewish faith. Sitting Shiva seems an especially valuable exercise that our overall society might think about adopting.
   
   As it is (I think here of funerals for members of my own family), an American funeral is often a wild 24-hour ride through the wake, the funeral and a gathering afterwards. The idea of structuring mourning over a good length of time just seems so human and right.
   
   I would suggest that the book could be improved by a larger type face -- that's the book publisher and designer in me speaking. Overall however kudos for an indepth work with loads of material.



2. Though the book was bulky, the style was for m a bit dry as well, the real prblem I had with it was that I nearly only saw stories of non-orthodox converts. I would not recommend it as an intro to love judaism.....



3. I wanted this book when I first saw it in the bookstore when it was originally published, but balked at the price, and by the time I began to think about finally getting my own copy, it seemed to have gone out of popular circulation. I eventually found a used copy for a much more reasonable price, and it was really worth the wait. I had begun reading it before, and all of the rest of the many personal stories, based on interviews Mrs. Myrowitz had conducted, were just as good. The author herself is a JBC, and shared in the lengthy but quite good introduction her own personal story and journey. Like a number of people profiled here, she too technically converted because she was in a relationship with a Jew, but not in the traditional way one is used to. Instead of undergoing some superficial conversion for no other reason than she was marrying a man who insisted she convert (or whose family ordered her to convert), she had already long been drawn to Judaism and Judaic values anyway, and finding the man who became her husband was more like the catalyst to do something serious about these feelings. Although not all of the JBCs profiled converted for marriage; some, at least at the date of publication, weren't even in relationships. Many people assume the only reason someone would become Jewish (or any other non-Christian religion) is because of an impending marriage, but here we have plenty of stories of people who did it only for themselves, before even being in a relationship, or who still aren't in a relationship period, with either a Jew or a Gentile. And not all of the stories are of white converts; there were some individuals profiled who are African-American, and I loved the story of the woman whose husband was living in France but with Moroccan roots. It's such a myth that Jews are only white and from Eastern or Central Europe. Many things led these people to convert, but overall they prove what is often said, that a JBC is oftentimes more devout, passionate, and committed than many JBBs. I also enjoyed the extensive bibliography and have since read or bought a number of the wonderful books suggested.



4. I picked this book up off the shelves of my local JCC library. Amidst the books on conversion that I've encountered so far, I find it to be the least partisan. It shows a spectrum of conversion experiences from liberal to orthodox, male and female, striaght and gay, white and of colour authors. I found it to be highly articulate.and intimate.



5. I found the stories in this book highly interesting and enjoyed reading the tales of those who have chosen to convert to Judaism. I recommend it for those who are converting or who have relatives who convert. It explains why people choose to convert, the problems that can be associated with converting, and how they dealt with those problems.

5 comments about To Play With Fire: One Woman's Remarkable Odyssey.

1. Tonica aka Joy aka Tova has the misfortune to be born to a couple of warped religious fanatics. Her mother a Sephardic Jew is the daughter of an orthodox father and not so observant mother. Eventually, Tonica's mother and grandmother become Christians while her grandfather and two uncles remain orthodox. Sally, Tonica's mother meets and marries Jim Marlow, a born again Christian. They move to England where Jim is content to live in the shadow of his wartime buddy, Raymond who eventually becomes cult leader "Daddy Raymond."
   
   Tonica is 16 when Daddy Raymond gets the "revelation" that her father and mother are supposed to sell everything they own (including Tonica's beloved horse), donate it to the church/cult and quit their jobs and move into a one bedroom apartment and work for the cult for free. Her father the head of the household dutifully complies, even though he is only two years away from a full pension, and Tonica is left homeless. They dump her at Daddy Raymond's new Bible college for "training." Tonica is abused physically, verbally, and spiritually to the point that she stays with church/cult and severs all contact with her parents after Daddy Raymond excommunicates them.
   
   If you replace church with revolution, Jesus with Chairman Mao, and Daddy Raymond with one of Mao's lower henchmen you could be reading a memoir of the Cultural Revolution. The basic premises are the same; impressionable young people are beaten into submission physically and psychologically. Then they try to out do each other in their adoration of a so called deity who becomes their raison d'etre. In the process they spy and tattle on each other, turn in and or disown family members, in order to win favor and work their way up the hierarchy. They also devise petty backstabbing machinations that rival day time soaps. The final reward for all this effort is group acceptance and recognition from the cult leader.
   
   This book is just under 450 pages and the first 300 or so pages we are dragged through Tonica's thought processes during her nine years with the cult; I think I'm really Jewish, no I love Jesus, no I'm Jewish, no I love Jesus. The redundancy itself was agonizing, but what I found extremely frustrating was her inability to wake up and leave this cult of freaks. She is very capable of making a bonafide living, has had positive contact with the outside world, and even been offered a ticket to Israel by her estranged uncle. Instead she chooses to stay and continue to be abused and used as slave labor.
   
   This book would have been much more palatable if it had been kept under 150 pages and or written by a third party with some insightful commentary about cults and missionaries. Other than her thoughts on modesty for a woman's spiritual development versus modesty to prevent male temptation very little of this memoir was thought provoking. I found Tonica's husband's story impressive, but he doesn't' appear until page 413. He was born into a blueblood church family. He came to Judaism completely on his own after reading through the Bible and after a priest is unable to successfully answer his numerous questions. At age 18 he immigrated to Israel. I thought that was pretty gutsy. On the back of the book it says; "Tova also lectures throughout the world on being Jewish in a contemporary society." Given her and her husband's backgrounds I think they would be very well suited to do a Noahide outreach and or anti-missionary work.
   
   Turbulent Souls by Stephen Dubner is a similar, but much better book. Dubner's American WWII Era Jewish parents for some reason felt compelled to convert to Catholicism. Then they met and married. Dubner is more sophisticated, does his research, and asks thought provoking questions as he winds his way back to the religion of his grandparents.



2. If you are looking for a book which details the intellectual and rational search of a person for the soul's home in the Jewish faith, this is not the book to read. Coming from a cultic, dysfunctional Pentecostal family, the author is very emotional and seems to judge religious precepts purely on the basis of how they "feel". I don't doubt that she had a life-long feeling of inner-connectedness to Judiasm,but all one reads is how a woman exchanged a christian faith which controlled all her action for a jewish version of the same.



3. Tova Mordechai's story of her journey from a Pentecostal cult to Judaism reads like a Jewish _A Little Princess_: she lives in poverty surrounded by plenty, is forcibly separated from her family; she succeeeds at everything she tries and yet receives no recognition for her successes, but she is cheerful and good-hearted throughout. If this book were fiction, it would be remarkable for its excellent writing, suspenseful plot, and believable characters. The fact that the book actually happened is all the more amazing. _To Play with Fire_ compellingly tells a truly fascinating and inspirational story, giving the reader an insight behind closed doors of two little-understood religions.
   
   Any autobiographical work about an author's religious "odyssey" sets off alarm bells in the mind of a demanding reader, yet this book avoids the clichees. Despite telling a very personal story about the evolution of the author's fundamental religious beliefs, it maintains a distance from them: much to her credit, the author does not attempt to persuade readers of the truth of her new belief system, and she does write a relatively honest assessment of her new life. Further, it is clear that Ms. Mordechai is writing for her audience, not herself: she tells her story because others have found it fascinating, not because she thinks herself a model of humanity, again quite unique of autobiographical works.
   
   Nevertheless, I do wish that she had written more about her current life. She mentions her reluctance to accept anything blindly, and indeed she argues extensively with the Lubavitch rabbis at her seminary, but she nonetheless stayed within Lubavitch during her struggles, rather than exploring other streams of Judaism, such as the Greek-Jewish and Egyptian-Jewish traditions of her ancestors.
   
   While the most important part of her exploration occurred in the transition from Christian to Jewish, I wish she had discussed her thoughts about the nature of religion itself: whether power in any religious group should ever be centralized in one figure whose opinion determines the policy of the religious group, or whether decentralized power (as in the classical Jewish model of multiple rival opinions) is safer.
   
   It is understandable that she cannot risk personal relationships by giving a complete discussion of her own life in her small community, but I was disappointed to watch her lush prose become sparse at the very end, and to see her incisive commentary become more muted.
   
   One warning to the reader: it is impossible to read only one chapter and it compelled me to stay up until 3 am to finish it.



4. This book is a very honest one. I especially loved the fact that Tova did not show Orthodox Judaism in rosy colors, but were describing her negative feelings and experience with Orthodox Judaism as well. And there were plenty of what to be upset about. However, she chooses Orthodox Judaism for the rest of her life.

   She made it clear that she despised Christianity not just because she was abused by so called "Christians" but also because she was rejecting the New Testament itself. She wrote openly inside her book that Jesus was a false prophet, and that Gospels were misquoting and distorting the Jewish Scriptures. She revealed herself as a very educated and knowledgeable minister quoting the verses from the Bible in order to explain us why according to her the entire Christian doctrine is wrong.

   I highly recommend this book to all people: both Jews and Christians. Written in a very sophisticated English it will certainly help them to understand it other.

   Also, this new edition "To Play with Fire" is much better than the old one "Playing with Fire". This new edition is longer on sixty pages and reveals more details about her experience and feelings. Even if you own the book "Playing with Fire", you certainly should get this uncut and unedited edition, too.




5. I read this back when it was called "Playing With Fire". I am not sure which branch of fundimentalist Christianity her family was with....perhaps the British group "Plymouth Brethren", they were really cultlike. Her background was extreme, but her issues with Christianity are thoughtful and not merely colored by her strange community.

   I recognized alot of things from my sojourn with fundimentalism, and I found her honesty refreshing. She is also very straightforward about the Jewish community she has joined. She doesn't paint an easy rosey picture of her transition. I still think of her and her husband, a convert from Episcopalianism. I think if you are interested in conversion stories and people affirming their Judaism you will love this book.

   I remember vividly her description of the heartrending time of her sister's death, and her parent's programmed reaction.

   Good Luck Tova! I am so glad to see this reissue of your book!

No comments about Ukrainian Soul: The Story of the Family Volkoff from Borzna.

No comments about Storm Against the Innocents: Holocaust Memories and other Stories.

5 comments about Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Children's Diaries of World War II.

1. As a teacher I found this book to be an excellent way to personalize the experiences of the many child victims of the Holocaust for my students. They could see that these children had families, hopes, and dreams just like any other child although some were shattered by the Holocaust. My students could read about someone their own age and identify with them. I was disappointed with the inclusion of the Joan Wyndham diary for my own school setting. I teach eighth graders in a Catholic school and some of the discussion of her sexuality is inapproriate for my students. That is the only blemish on this wonderful book from my particular situation. It requires that I take extra caution when I use the book.



2. The book Children in the Holocaust and world war two and their secret diaries was one of the sadest books I've ever read, and I'm not just saying that because I'm doing this for a school project. I couldn't beleive Hitler actually did these things to Jews and any kind of person.
   Before I read this book I knew nothing about the Holocaust I didnt even know what the Holocaust was, and i thought it was gonna be a boreing project. I almost cried because of the facts these children wrote. I couldn't and still cant beleive these children kept diaries, risking there lives to tell what Hitler was doing. I rate this book with five stars because it was sad, exciting and some of the diary entries were really discriptive and I enjoyed it. Thanks for your time.



3. This is a chilling, moving, important book in which 23 youth and youngsters try to understand the hatred and violence that engulfs their previously peaceful lives. The average age of the writers is around 13-14 years. For many of these children, these excerpts represent their final plea to the surviving world, fully understanding that they will not be a part of that world. Writing became their last and sometimes ONLY form of resistance. I found the very last entry of the unknown brother and sister in the Lodz ghetto to be especially moving. Without access to any other paper, the boy scrawled his diary entries into the margins of an old French novel. After the war was over, a next door neighbor returned to the wreckage of the house, and found the book with the boy's notes in it. If any one of us actually knew any one of those who wrote these diaries... if any one of them were a member of our own families, we would naturally value even one of their retrieved pages far above all of the other books we own, would we not? Well, as I read this book I realized many times that just because I did not know one of these children personally does not really diminish the inherent importance of any one of their pages... these children were all known and loved by their own families and friends. They should have been loved by those who were then acting as their mortal enemies, but sadly, they were not.

   Some of these entries depict deprivations and describe atrocities that are near impossible for most of us today to imagine. Some would avoid the book on account of this, and that is understandable. We can go to horror novels to be deliberately horrified in a fictional sense, but it seems morbid to turn to non-fiction for the same results. But we must remember that we do not read non-fiction for the same reasons that we read fiction. We read non-fiction, not to dwell on or glory in horror, but to LEARN something about ourselves and others. There is an old saying "To dwell on history is to lose an eye; to ignore it is to lose both of them." Laurel Holliday has here edited a book which should not be ignored.




4. This book will touch you. It will make you sad, it will make you reflect on the past. But most of all, it will inform you about the perils and daily life of children (mostly Jewish Children) during World War II. The author did an excellent job of compiling, translating, and editing the diary entries she found and chose to print. I would recommend it to most of my friends.



5. These diaries and journals are incredible. To read the words of these children is life changing. Their honest and powerful words present a very different picture of daily life during WWII than anything I have ever read. Some of the children were in ghettos, some in camps, some in hiding--their words are pure and honest. After reading their stories, you will not think about the Holocaust in the same way you did before.

No comments about A Treasury of Jewish Inspirational Stories.

2 comments about The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family.

1. Fascinating history of a sephardic family from Inquisition days to modern times. Well told, if a bit self indulgent



2. 'The Sun at Midday' reviewed by Samir Raafat for the "Cairo Times" Thursday, April 17, 1997 IN HER BOOK, The Sun at Midday, the Alexandria-born Gini Alhadeff runs us through the different members of her family which means flashbacks from Tokyo, Northern Italy, Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Auschwitz, Rhodes, Greenville (Mississippi) and back. The habitats range from palatial villas in Alexandria to a two-room flat in Manhattan with a reference to the Italian fashion house of Krizia founded by the author's aunt, Mrs. Aldo Pinto née Mariuccia Mandelli. Gardens are everywhere, all of them heavenly, the scent changing with each season and every repatriation. With the help of a desk top computer and a `Family Tree Maker' software, genealogy buffs will love this book as they eagerly enter a collection of Byronic Mediterranean names belonging to the author's relations: Pinto, Piha, Menashe, Aghion, Tilche, Riches, Alhadeffs, etc., discovering in the process that most middle class Jewish families in Alexandria were connected and that they made good wherever destiny took them. And how, through marriage, they were also related to Lawrence Durrell! Undoubtedly, these colorful relations is what makes Alhadeff's family worth writing about. Of all her ethnic and national identities, the reader senses that Alhadeff is taken in mostly by her Jewish ancestry. Not unlike US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, Alhadeff discovered her rabbinical roots - in this case Sephardi - in her adulthood. A consequence of this revelation is the Judaica which is palpable throughout `The Sun at Midday.' And just in case anyone overlooks the plight of her relations this century thinking it was simply a matter of colorful trips across five continents, Alhadeff gives extensive coverage of her Uncle Nissim's sojourn in several German-run WWII concentration camps. Nissim's story is the longest recit allocated to any single member of the author's family. This lengthy chapter would have been five times as interesting had one not repeatedly stumbled on analogous passages in any of the thousands of books, novels, thrillers, articles, films and CD-ROMS that deal with the subject. And with Alhadeff's book appearing soon after Daniel Goldhagen's encyclopedic work on the subject (`Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust'), Uncle Nissim's episodes seems somewhat parochial. In her character portrayals, which takes up a good part of her book, Alhadeff is both amusing and direct. Yet, when it comes to describing geographic locations, facts and some of the zeitgeist surrounding the events, beware with a capital B. Alhadeff could have made sterling use of a beginner's Atlas and an Almanac. Some elementary cross-checking with regards her family's oral testimonials would have also helped. On the other hand, if Alhadeff's representations of her relations are as spot on as her description of Father Pierre Riches, the Jewish dandy turned Catholic priest, then, Bravo Gini! I met Riches three Springs ago, once at the Jesuit school in Fagalla and again for a beer at my Maadi garden and he is exactly as the author describes him, a man "who drops names the way certain women put on too many jewels." While we accept that history is informed gossip, Alhadeff should have ascertained the accuracy of some of the statements made by her relations. The book is full of what would at first seem as irrelevant misrepresentations, yet looked at collectively, they could be misinterpreted as an attempt to dramatize, especially if the reader is Egyptian, a Japanese Samurai or a member of the Catholic deity. For instance, Alhadeff's places the Egyptian coastal town of al-Alamein at 15 kilometers from Alexandria. While this - some would say extraneous - proximity lends credence to "panic in the city" of Alexandria or "Alexandria being bombarded" making it sound like Normandy or Dunkirk, it is of-course factually incorrect, for Alamein is over 120 kilometers away and the little bombardment that Alexandria sustained during WWII pales next to that received by the remotest European hamlet. Stating that one of the leading cotton experts of Alexandria was German and thus by implication hostile to Alhadeff's Jewish cotton-trading grandfather, invariably projects that certain `je ne sais quoi' salable German-Jewish drama which became so literary delectable whenever discussing the 1930s and `40s. Sorry again Ms. Alhadeff, but Mr. Rheinhardt was Swiss, not German. When Alhadeff's mother "finished school there was no question of her going to university, because there was none in Egypt, because she was a woman, and because of the war." There again, the contrived effects for drama. Yet, a cursory leafing through any contemporary Almanac could have enlightened Alhadeff on the existence of several universities including the co-ed American University in Cairo which closed for only a few months during WWII. Saad Zaghloul (in this instance Alhadeff got his name right) was prime minister once and not five times. And as for old insignias and decorations being returned to the government when receiving new ones... funny yes, but incorrect. Those seeking entertainment will find that `The Sun at Midday' abounds with it. Alhadeff has an engaging style and her stories are punctuated with anecdotes. As oral history goes, her book is informative and her continuous play with fast-back and fast-forward makes it even more compelling. If you've read André Aciman's Out of Egypt and liked it, then I most certainly recommend Gini Alhadeff's book.

1 comments about Scattered Among the Peoples: The Jewish Diaspora in Ten Portraits.

1. This book tells the stories of Europe's Jewish diaspora from 1492-1967 in a series of portraits of the communities. From Venice to Amsterdam to Spain to Russia and Vilna among others are given a slice of life/slice of time of these amazing and enduring Jews. We learn of a Jewish ghetto where the Jews are shut in every night(for their protection). We also learn of the open Amsterdam ghetto where Jews lived like equals and prospered. We learn fo the great Jewish communities of Spain that were crushed in 1492, including the land of Maimonidies. We learn of the Vilna ghetto and Abba Kovners partisans who fought to take revenge for the destruction of the Jeursalum on the Baltic. We also learn of the Russian Jews of 1967 who yearned to return to their land of Israel after the Six day war.

   This is a wonderful book that explores many people and many cultures and sheds a light on the events of the Diaspora in Europe.

   A must read.

2 comments about The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian.

1. Hillberg wrote this as a Phd thesis, and therefore it is a carefully researched book. I have an original copy signed by the author, and it came at a time to be my first major purchase on the subject. I had a chance to hear him speak a couple of years ago and brought my copy along. He was amazed that any still existed. Because of the purpose, it is not a "story," but a well done place for any one serious in learning could well start. His beginning statement of the eras of Jewish history is still the best I've ever hear in the 45 yrs. of collecting--read it and see.



2. The memoir is a much needed supplement for the scholarly works of undoubtedly peerless Holocaust researcher. All the process of transforming of Holocaust studies from metaphysical reflections into a scholarly discipline is revealed before our eyes, with almost tragic touch of author's own fate as "controversial"(for some) and plagiated scholar. And also a personal note: Gauleiter Kube, a much maligned Hitler's boss of Belorussia, got in Hillberg's magnum opus Destruction of European Jews some flesh and blood which made me understand better the Holocaust reality in my native land.
   

   Hilberg's works are surely uneasy reading for those who perceive the Holocaust through a comforting model reduced to "... a more familiar picture of a struggle-- however unequal--between combatants" (p.135).
   

   The language of the book is unusual and its laconism , though sometimes veiling the sense, is accompanied by inner dramatic beauty and power.
   

   In general, Hilberg's memoir is a mind-nourishing and thought-provoking book, a must for anyone with an interest in history of the 20th century.