No comments about Reb Moshe: The Life and Ideals of HaGaon Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (Artscroll History Series).

2 comments about Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil.

1. This is not an easy book. It is a glance into the lives of 3 women, Hanna Arendt, Simone Weil, and Edith Stein, each of Jewish descent and, in particular, at the response each one made to Nazism. There is a review of each woman's life and her career. A lot of space is given to the education of these women, which is especially interesting since each studied under some of the biggest names in philosophy in the 20th century. It is not easy to follow, however, unless you have some basic knowledge of Heidegger, Jaspers, Alain, Husserl. But it is still interesting. Each of these women chose a different response (not just to nazism, but to the world, actually). Arendt became strongly Zionist, and an author of wonderful books; Simone Weil, strangely at odds with her heritage, but whose essays are marvels of clarity, chose a strange path of starvation (whatever the philosophical underpinnings, one wonders about anorexia); Edith Stein converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun, devoting her life to prayer (though still writing). Each of these responses is fascinating in its own right. I highly recommend this difficult, but rewarding book.



2. I am no philosopher, but have read the works of the three women who are the subjects of the book.
   I was hoping to put the three lives into the context of the intellectual and social world they lived in, and how and why they made their individual decisions on philosophy, religion, and their approach to the questions posed by both Nazism and the feminist movement.
   But little detail is given about the intellectual life. We are told the names of their mentors: but not any details of what these mentors taught (a major flaw for the non philosophy student who is not familiar with Heddiger etc.).
   At the same time, except for some fine passages on Simone Weil, there is little detail on the inner lives of the women: we see only the outline of their parallel lives, often mixed together in a confusing manner. Arendt's affair with her professor, a subject recently treated in detail in a recent Atlantic magazine article, is given one sentence. Stein converts, with no more detail on her inner life than one could read in a blurb in the Catholic encyclopedia.
   In summary, the author fails to provide details for the novice to understand the lives of these women, but does not go into sufficient depth for a philosophy student to learn anything new.
   However, the passages on Simone Weil are an exception to my criticism. I did learn a lot about both her writings and why she thought and wrote her famous letters.

No comments about Outsider in the Promised Land: An Iraqi Jew in Israel.

2 comments about Dakota Diaspora: Memoirs of a Jewish Homesteader.

1. Having spent 15 years in North Dakota, I was looking forward to some insights into the lives of Jewish migrants to a difficult world. This book describes some aspects of their experience, mainly fascinating domestic incidents well worth preserving. Unfortunately, the book lacks a scene-setting introduction or epilogue to place her story in Eastern European and Midwestern history. What happeened to Sopie and her family after these events? Who are the others mentioned in the acknowledgements? The Rachel Calof memoir, which closely parallels this one, is a model of its kind and can be highly recommended.



2. Dakota Diaspora is a lovely book which tells of the author's experiences as a child growing up Jewish on the prairie. From Russia to "Nordakota" Ms. Trupin attempts to understand her parents and their motivations for leaving the "known" for such a great "unknown." She draws mostly upon her own childhood memories, rather than gathering first-hand accounts from her parents. I found the ending somewhat disappointing because we don't find out if the author was able to maintain her Yiddishkeit, which her mother was so concerned that the children would lose without a strong Jewish community. A great book for those looking for a good biography. As a Torah-seeking Kansan, I appreciated reading about a turn-of-the-century Jewish family who departed from the well trodden paths to New York and Chicago in order to live on the land AND maintain a Torah lifestyle.

No comments about Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations (Literary Conversations Series).

1 comments about Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait.

1. A paraphrase of this memoir would give the sense that 'Henry Green' was a typical British writer of the 1930s: a superposh old Etonian who precociously published his first novel at Oxford, and was driven by class guilt to work as a foundryman. Or, in his words, 'as was said in those days I had a complex and in the end it drove me to go to work in a factory with my wet podgy hands'. The prose style is what makes this book an absolute one-off - chatty, cleverly idiomatic, bathetic, loveable and self-effacing. 'Pack my Bag' isn't a book you'd read for the plot (unless you're interested in the faux-hardships of wealthy, hypersensitive schoolboys?), but its account of the Great War is full of compelling anecdotes (like the shellshocked soldier who stayed at the country estate of Green's parents - 'no longer human when he came to us'). If you like these subtle-ish modernist writers like Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen you might fall for Green, as sophisticated a stylist as any of the big modernist names (Woolf, Lawrence etc), but with an intimacy and sweetness that you don't necessarily associate with experimental writing. And he's funny, too. No wonder the people who love Henry Green really, really love Henry Green.

2 comments about Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

1. The personal stories and the "fiction" in this collection were very impactful...and told a story that only children of survivors could identify with.



2. Published just in time for Passover, the holiday of freedom, Melvin Jules Bukiet (STRANGE FIRE, NEUROTICA, SIGNS AND WONDERS, Professor at Sarah Lawrence) has collected some of the works of the children of Shoah survivors, the Second Gen'ers, the "2G." I was drawn to this book by its cover art, in which the sign over the gates to Auschwitz reads "NOTHING MAKES YOU FREE" instead of the actual "WORK MAKES YOU FREE/Arbeit Macht Frei". Included in the book are pieces in English and those translated into English from Italian, French, Serbian, Swedish, Hebrew, German, and Hungarian. Although these adult "CHILDREN" grew up around the world, they carry a common literary burden and can spot each other in crowded rooms. Bukiet (the son of number 108016) asks "how atrocity gets filtered through imagination." This collection helps to answer it. He writes that if the Holocaust is a historic Rorschach blot, in it the depressive can justify despair, the hopeful can find redemption, and the stupid can discern the triumph of the spirit. The collected authors grew up as children of a nightmare, children of the khurban that "is a black hole that devours the light." Bukiet explains that they lived with parents that had numbers tattooed on their arms; parents who saw their kids as replacements for murdered family members; parents whose Yiddish language was now as dead as Sanskrit; parents who appreciated life having known death (or resigned themselves to suicide); parents with cauterized tear ducts; and parents who never wasted food at the dinner table, having known hunger intimately. Their parents lived with the aftermath of atrocity and passed on these psyches to their 2G-Second Generation children (either through speaking of it always or never speaking of it). Many of the 2G authors are rage filled, angry, cynical, and distrustful. And This makes for good writing.

   The authors included in the collection are, in Part 1: Carl Friedman, Eva Hoffman, Victoria Reel, Tammie Bob, Ruth Knafo Setton, Goran Rosenberg, Doron Rabinovici, Alan Kaufman, and Barbara Finkelstein; in Part 2: Savyon Liebrecht, JJ Steinfeld, Thane Rosenbaum, Henri Raczymov, Sonia Pilcer, Lily Brett, Val Vinokurov, Helena Janaczek, Esther Dischereit, and cartoonist Art Spiegelman; and in Part 3: Anne Karpf, Lea Anini, Gila Lustiger, Joseph Skibell, Leon De Winter, Alcina Lubitch Domecq, Mihaly Kornis, Peter Singer, David Albahari, Alain Finkielkraut, and the editor Melvin Jules Bukiet. I recommend that you read the authors' brief bios before starting to read the collected works. Not included are authors like David Lehman and David Curzon, who identify as 2G, but whose parents escaped Vienna in 1939; and the journalist, Joseph Berger (Displaced Persons), since he were born slightly prior to May 7, 1945.

5 comments about The Defiant: A True Story.

1. This is the original hardbound edition of the extraordinary account of Selim Sznycer (who later took the name Shalom Yoran), of his family's flight from the Nazi invasion of western Poland to the eastern, Soviet-occupied town of Kurzeniec, where they remained until the Germans bombed there too, killing his parents.
   
   Rather than surrender to a certain death, Selim and his brother Musio fled to a deeply forested swampy area, at whose center they constructed a hidden bunker with some friends. There, they struggled merely to stay clothed, warm and fed. They had little to trade and no money with which to buy, and were reduced to infrequent forays into villages several miles distant, where they could steal enough rags and potatoes to survive. Lighting fires was difficult; the smell or sight of smoke could attract attention.
   
   At one point, Yoran left the hovel to search for food only to return and find several comrades dead. He and his brother then fled further east, and ultimately joined the Soviet and Polish partisans. This was not only an act of extraordinary defiance, it was itself fraught with danger, as both the Polish peasants and Russian partisans with whom they fought were themselves highly distrusting, and hateful, of Jews. At first, Selim was not trusted with guns. He was left to fight with sticks, a fake rifle, and in one case, a pitchfork. But gradually, a few comrades developed trust and respect for him, as he became an expert at bombing the railroad tracks carrying German supply trains. He derailed several trains; the sabotage stopped German war materiel transports--and required extensive new track construction, significantly slowing Germany's war machine in the region.
   
   Ultimately, the author survived and fled Europe for Israel, where he broke through the British blockade, joined the Israeli air force and built a successful Israeli business. Although Yoran necessarily survived only by fighting, success (as I have written before) is the best revenge. And for Yoran, that came through building a new life, business and family in Israel.
   
   This is a terrific book, for young and old alike.
   
   --Alyssa A. Lappen



2. The Defiant is the story of Shalom Yoran (born Selim Sznycer)
   , and his time spent with the partisans fighting the Nazis in Poland. After three years on the run , with his family , from Nazi mobile killing units , the Nazi terror finally caught up with them and in the little town of Kurzeniec , 1 040 Jewish men , women and children where dragged from their homes and hiding places , murdered and burned. Included among those slaughtered where Selim's parents.
   
   Selim and his brother escaped into the woods and joined the partisans , and heeded the last words of their mother to survive and take vengeance for them.
   
   This is the story of the partisan guerilla warfare against Nazi terror.
   Although Selim fought among non-Jews , he always fought first and foremost as a Jew - with them but not as one of them. He dreamed of having his own country , of fighting for it and even dying for it-that is what kept him alive. The dream of surviving and living in the Land of Israel as a free Jew and building it.
   After the war , his dream was fulfilled , and having escaped the Soviet Army that tried to draft him , and the British blockade that tried to keep Jews out of Palestine , he settled in Israel and joined the airforce , becoming a prominent businessman in Israel.
   The Zionists in Europe where always the backbone of Jewish resistance to Nazism.



3. I very much enjoyed reading such a fascinating book. I never realized the work of the Jewish partisans nor the anti-smitism that also existed on the part of even the resistance fighters.
   Just a great book that really emphasizes the terrors of the Nazi regime. It also goes to show what happens to a people who are disarmed and in many cases have only sticks and pitchforks to fight back w/.



4. I loved this book. This is very different than "Bravest Battle" or "Hiding Place". There are a half dozen points I would have never learned: - This was a 14yr old from an upper middle class family. He was able to constuct a dirt house & survive a brutally cold winter with NO supplies or knowlege. - Everyone hated them. The Russians, the Polish farmers, everyone. - At one point he lived rather free, but under Russian Rule. Even though the consequences were death or life in prison, every person under Socialism cheated and were capitalist. From kids to grannies. Rather powerful! I'm making each of my kids read this book. It was great & I read it straight through.



5. Shalom Yoran is a long time frind of my grandparents. I visited him at his hous a few months ago. There i got a signed copy of this book. It is the gretest book i have ever read. This is one book every person in the world should read to learn what the jewish people went through. Find out the truth about the holocaust and what we could have prevented

No comments about Raoul Wallenberg: Swedish Diplomat and Humanitarian (Holocaust Biographies).

No comments about To Grow in Wisdom : An Anthology of Abraham Joshua Heschel.