Staff: COLUMNISTS, EDITORIAL STAFF AND STAFF WRITERS
NEW YORK. PEOPLE. SOCIETY. EVENTS. GOSSIPS
JEWISH WORLD
COLUMNS
BOOKS REVIEWS
ILIL ARBEL'S "THE LEMON TREE" : A MASTERPIECE
As soon as
you begin to read Ilil Arbel's masterpiece, "The Lemon Tree", you start to feel
the presence of a superb writer who has unveiled the intimate secrets of
conversing with the depth of the soul and the warmth of a parallel world of
beauty and love which dissipated in joyfully morose and cherished memories.
Arbel's tender, heart felt and nostalgic style echoes the drama of Tolstoy and
charming eloquence of Victor Hugo. The inner world of Tolstoy bursts in war and
peace. The external world of Hugo explodes within fragile tableaux of human
drama, romantic visions and half human, half divine lyricism. In her book, Arbel
blends both, the human lava of Tolstoy and the enchanting world of the family,
the loved ones, the painful memory of a lost child, the shadow of a hard
destiny which still haunts those who survived tyranny and horror, and perhaps,
just perhaps the sadness they feel, for they are unable now to share moments of
joy and peace with the loved ones who are no longer around...This was the world
of the man who wrote "Les Miserables", and Hugo's world takes form and place in
the writings of Arbel.
Photo:
Ilil Arbel, author of "THE LEMON TREE".
The past is romantic, but no one wants to live it again. In Arbel's book, the past continues on a different path. It is a joyful one, a hopeful road of life, despite the hard time, the suffering, the constant threat of typhoid fever and horrible deceases without cure, facing arrest at Port Said, the fear of being shot by Manchurian officials for smuggling "a few necessities of life", and desperately chasing runway trains, her parents went through, suffered from and barely made it to the promised land. Arbel wrote about all these unpleasant and horrifying events her parents experienced and suffered from. However, the sweetness and lyrical warmth of her style, the way she described how Marusia, Ilil family's nanny was concerned about Ida, (Ilil's mother) frozen nose, because Siberia's icy weather, where Ilil's parent previously lived, had no mercy on humans, and how papa used to rub her frozen nose with snow and goose fat, while hugging her. You will be touched by the simplistic, yet majestically eloquent and descriptive style of Arbel which brought back the memories of taking trips to the woods to collect bluebells and wild berries, skating on the Siberian ice, building huge snowmen with coal eyes, traveling in troikas, pushing their "child-size sleds", running madly with exuberant joy and innocence, jumping to lie on them and " traveling for unbelievable distances on the uninterrupted sheets of ice, feeling as if they were flying."
THE LEMON TREE": A TRIUMPH OF THE PEN AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT!
Photo:
Ida Rosenfeld, Ilil's Mama and co-author of the magnificent book "THE LEMON
TREE". A great woman with a heart bigger than the world we live in. Photo taken
in Nancy, France.
In a heart-felt style and with an honest beauty, Arbel wrote: "Under the dining room window stood a tropical jungle. Mama could raise any plant, anywhere, even in the arctic weather of Siberia...Mama had a special piece of furniture built for the houseplants, shaped like wooden stairs, stained dark brown, and hand rubbed with oil to a high gloss. Diverse plants stood on the stairs, arranged according to height. The rich, dark green leaves moved slightly in the air currents created by the ever-present heat from the giant stove and the occasional drafts when the door was opened. The intricate greenery looked magical against the white world outside." Another passage from "The Lemon Tree" touched my heart and my very soul. It goes like this "The next day I woke up early, remembering that this was Sasha's tenth birthday.
I knew a big secret-the nature of the best present- and was terribly excited. It was still dark and bitterly cold, despite the stove in every room, and I hurriedly put on my wooly blue dressing gown and furry slippers before running downstairs to the warm kitchen. It smelled of cinnamon and cloves, since Mama was already creating the birthday cake, her arms deep into flour and sugar. No one could make and decorate cakes like her. Later in Israel, during a desperate shortage of eggs, butter, and sugar, she made cakes from powdered eggs, coarse flour and imitation margarine, and they were still the best cakes I ever ate. I remember her melting raw brown sugar with a tiny birthday candle to create decorations on those cakes, and I still firmly believe that if necessary, she could conjure perfectly good food from virtually thin air." This is how Arbel brought to life the fond memories of her parents, her mama, her grandmother, the aroma that floated in their warm kitchen, the loving, cozy and affectionate warmth which surrounded her parents in Siberia. But the tour de force is how she described the atrocious trip her parents took from Siberia to Israel. And the piece de resistance which will melt the ice in your heart and paint rainbows of one million splashes of rays, lights and mesmerizing tenderness is Arbel's depiction of a tiny potted lemon tree which traveled with the family on a yearlong hard journey. Arbel tells us that "Sasha, their son and brother, raised the lemon tree from a seed that floated in his tea. Dying at age ten, his last request was that the lemon tree would be planted in an orchard in Israel. Nothing would deter the family from fulfilling Sasha's dream." They barely escaped from being shot in Manchuria for smuggling the very few necessities they needed to survive. They chased and chased and chased trains, almost arrested at each port, threatened by illness and feared catching diseases and typhoid fever. Could they survive? Could the small lemon tree in a pot survive the unmerciful cold, the hard, hard and long journey?
"THE LEMON TREE" IS MORE THAN A BOOK OR A DIARY. IT IS A SYMBOL. THE SYMBOL OF SURVIVAL, FAMILY VALUES, THE GOODNESS OF THE EARTH AND THE NOBLE SOUL OF ALL THOSE WHO SPREAD LOVE AND BEAUTY AROUND US...
One could say, what is so special about a lemon tree story? A cold nose in Siberia? Or a tough trip to Israel? The answer is not as easy as the questions, for the message of "THE LEMON TREE" is bigger than life and larger than the immensity of the beauty and decadence of the human race! Yes, it is the chronicle of an ordinary Jewish Russian family who emigrated to Israel.
Yes, it is true, you will be reading about an ordinary and loving Siberian family who lost their child and promised to keep his soul alive through an ordinary lemon tree, should they succeed to plant it in an orchard in Israel. I would give my life for a lemon tree, for a cactus tree, even for the hell tree, if that tree would keep alive the soul, the fragile whispers, the bleeding memory, the loving face of a child I lost and loved so much! This tree is not a plant. In Arbel's book, as well as on the roads of life, Sasha's tree becomes a citadel, a temple, a cathedral, a shrine, a human chronicle, perhaps a human drama, and perhaps too, a guiding light...a strong shoulder...and the reflection of myriads of hope, perhaps? Thanks to the magnificent artistry of Ilil Arbel, the whispers of Ida, the jokes and stories of Papa, the silly but tasty cakes of Mama, we learned that the very simple day by day experience of ordinary but "real" people, the songs they sang, the stories they heard and told, the family bond that ties together, mother, father, grand mother, children and grandchildren, naive but funny jokes are more significant, meaningful , tender and mightier than all the swords of the Iliad and Herculean exploits. Get a copy of the book. Get more copies, if you have real friends. "THE LEMON TREE" is a masterpiece. One of the 10 best books of the year. A triumph of the pen and the human spirit. Two thumbs up.
THE LEMON TREE: Publication date: February 2005. Price: $11.95. Size: 6x9. ISBN: 0-595-33982-4. Pages: 104. Illustrated. Available from Ingram Book Group, Baker & Taylor, iUniverse, Inc., Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.
____________________________
End
of an Exile: Israel, The Jews and The Gentile World
B
y James Parkes
Review by Chaim Chertok, Professor of English at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva and author of the forthcoming book, He Also Spoke As A Jew: The Life of James Parkes, to be published by Vallentine Mitchell Publishers.
James Parkes, 1896-1981, is the British historian and Anglican theologian whose more than 20 books and many essays broke essential ground in the begetting of a new, positive Christian approach toward the Jewish people. As early as The Conflict Between the Church and the Synagogue (1934), decades ahead of the present tide of Christian revisionism, Parkes not only located the evil of anti-Semitism in the maw of the Gospels and the Church Fathers but denounced it not as an error but as a sin that had to be uprooted. Indeed, even earlier, Parkes was warning a complacent world about Hitler and, until he himself was almost assassinated, was active in spiriting Jewish refugees across the Continent. Years ahead of the curve and acting mostly alone, this maverick clergyman confronted the powerful missionary block with the Anglican establishment, arguing imperturbably that God did not desire the conversion of the Jews, that Judaism had never been superseded, that the age-old charge of deicide was a calumny which had no basis whatsoever, and that the teaching of contempt for God’s people was a sin again God. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that the Jewish people have ever had a better or better informed friend than James Parkes.
A new edition of End of an Exile: Israel, The Jews and The Gentile World is cause for celebration. Written more than 50 years ago, its argument for the justice and necessity for the return of the Jews to their homeland is as germane today as ever. It serves as a powerful corrective from within the Christian camp to so-called “liberation theology” espoused by trendy Protestant theologians who refuse to acknowledge that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism, and argue that the very existence of the Jewish State is the root of evil in the Middle East that needs to be effaced. Parkes was nothing if not a meticulous historian. In justifying the Jewish re-entry to a land that contained an Arab majority, for example, he demonstrates that Arab claims based upon historical continuity are spurious. As for Jews, however, if over the millennia their numbers in the Middle East have “constantly varied, is has been because of circumstances outside Jewish control, and not because Jews had themselves lost interest in living in their ‘promised land’. On the whole, it may be said that it [the Jewish presence] was always as large as possible in view of conditions existing at any one time.” Thus, End of an Exile is an elegant justification of classical Zionism. While strongly advocating a Jewish return to Zion, however, Parkes did not neglect simultaneously to caution Israel about her obligations: “One day she will recognize that it is wrong to evolve far-fetched arguments to deny any Arab rights in the land they had inhabited so long or to rest their case on the legality of the Balfour Declaration. She was allowed to override normal rights because she had unique claims. But the mission involved a deep debt of honour to those who lost by her gain.” Parkes’ comprehensive store of Jewish history enables him again and again to draw original, apposite comparisons. He points out, for example, how the 19th century resembles the Roman period. In both eras, Jews “could move freely in a civilization which exercised a powerful attraction for them.” If the former situation gave birth to a new religion, in the 19th century it was no ethical monotheism but the passion for social justice which provided the spark. “Consequently, the result was not a new religion, but the new political creed of socialism.” Similar stimulating, lively analyses may be found on almost every page. The editors Korn and Kalechofsky have not re-released Parkes’ writing, but have garnished the test with a rich array of essays. With two biographies soon to be released and this highly welcome reissue of this relevant Parkes text, 2005 gives every indication of being the year of Parkes.
End of an Exile: Israel, The Jews and The Gentile World by James Parkes, Edited and Introduced by Eugene B. Korn and Roberta Kalechofsky. Appendix Essays by Reinhold Niebuhr, A. Roy Eckhardt and Eight Others. Marblehead MA: Micah, 2004, 378 pp. $22.95
________________________________________________________________
Gutnick Edition Chumash - Bamidbar-Numbers
-
Commentary by the Lubavitcher Rebbe
"Beautifully designed, rich with splendid features on every single page.
This is a very concise and clear modern English translation of the Torah
according to Rashi. Accompanied with traditional commentary by authoritative
Rabbinic commentators, and scholars of Midrash and Talmud. This remarkable
publication is one of the "Essentials".- World Jewish News Agency.
The book includes: A full Hebrew text of Rashi and Onkelos; Separate running
commentary based on the Rebbe's sichos at the level of Pshuto shel mikra;
Explanation of the name of each Parsha according to the Rebbe's sichos; Summary
of Mitzvos found in each Parsha according to Sefer haChinnuch; Full text of
Haftaros according to Minhag Chabad, with English Translation according to
Metzudos. Ideal for all those wishing to study Chumash seriously, including:
Those wishing to Study classic commentaries to the Chumash in English and
Shluchim and Rabbonim seeking material for Shiurim and Lectures. (321 Pages).
Publisher: Kol Menachem, 2005
________________________________________________________________
M.L. MALCOLM'S "SILENT LIES": A TRIUMPH! A MASTERPIECE!
Review by Maximillien de Lafayette
Anchor
this in your mind: Silent Lies, a novel by M.L. Malcolm is a masterpiece. And
let's find out why?
Photo: Jacket/cover of "SILENT LIES", by Burtch Hunter Design LLC.
Malcolm in a captivating story-telling style a la Paris-Berlin-Mata Hari 1912 and Charles Boyer told us and wrote the melodramatic story of LEO, a Hungarian boy who lived in a world of suspense, drama, adventures, mesmerizing sequences and avalanches of events of a world that no longer exists...a modern time romantico-existentialistic-adventurer-go getter young man who mingled with the powerful, the rich, the famous, the infamous, the dangerous, characters of the night, adventurers and threatening figures under the fog of Shanghai...a modern Victor Hugo miserable who reinvented himself with style and unusual persona, who on his first, second or third date asks the woman who met: "Delighted to make your acquaintance. Shall we live in Budapest when we get married?" Quite a character...a human face from a different world. Yet, that mystique world did exist some 70 or 80 years ago in Europe. With a magical narrative style, Malcolm brought back to life, this vanished, mysterious, nostalgic world...along with the intrigues, schemes, adventures, conspiracies, dazzling tableaux of real life, passion, love, mysteries and beyond. It is a fascinating story which enrobes so many facets and aspects of the human spirit, the glitzy and esthetically frightening world of the early 20th century...
The book is written in a very unorthodox and hypnotically, mesmerizing beautiful style. Part, brief human chronicle, part, melodramatic fresco of events in the life of a man facing the world, alone and crossing the frontiers of odds and challenges in un-chartered territories, part, painfully rejoicing tableaux of human drama which is incomprehensible to those who shop a Wall Mart, part, analysis of a man's social, ethical-political priorities and choices, and part, the biggest image of REAL LIFE!
Photo:
M.L. Malcolm, author of SILENT LIES.
The cradle, tie, drama, metamorphosis and the stunning magic of the book rotate, evolve and burst around a boy born into an absolute poverty in Hungary, who uses his linguistic abilities to create for himself a new world with a better future, a world with new possibilities, new choices and unknown frontiers. The Hungarian visionary boy is caught up in a series of events which he is unable to control. He leaves Hungary and heads toward Shanghai, hiding a stolen diamond necklace. That necklace could be his new passport to a world of salvation, fortune, or perhaps, fatal destiny!? Malcolm, so admirably in a very intriguing descriptive style ties together all what surrounds the life of this young man. Ernst Hemingway, Emile Zola and Victor Hugo would have loved the narrative style of Malcolm and her human tableaux. For, Malcolm's writing style, compositional structure, narrative sequences, choice of titles for each separate chapter, warmth and substantial depth in the dialogues between LEO and the people, the men and the women he encounters and the delightfully confusing, romantic, fragile, promising and deceitful passages on the road of his life, transport you to an era, to a universe, to suspended moments in time and space, where only giants of the novel like Hugo, Tolstoy, Proust and Zola can forge and throw on the human landscape. Malcolm did just that! Malcolm, despite her relatively new "grand entrance" to the world of novels, would and could rival the best writers and story-tellers of our generation. In addition to the romantic and lyrical aura projected and imbibed by and from the milieus and life stage of Leo, Malcolm succeeded in flirting with the struggles and reconciliations Leo faced, including his own nonreligious Jewish heritage amid the persecution of the Jews in Hungary during and after the first world war and particularly during Nazi Germany. Malcolm, the magician story-teller and writer talked about various events and stories that influenced her and caused major impact on her novel. One of them is the story of her husband's great Aunt Melitta who was an artist. "She used her skill to forge a Siamese (Thai) transit visa for herself and her family, and they escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Shanghai. Melitta and her husband evaded confinement in the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai, because, like Leo, they invented new identities for themselves. They lived in the French Concession for the duration of the war." said M.L. Malcolm.
Malcolm continues: "Hearing Litty's story began my fascination with Shanghai. I was intrigued by the idea that, for over fifty years, it was the only place in the civilized world where you could just show up, without a passport or visa, and begin a new life. The stories of the people who made--and lost--fortunes there were absolutely captivating. I was particularly interested in the period between the two World Wars, because it was a time of such dramatic societal change all over the Western world. At some point I came across a story about a notorious Shanghai gangster, the head of one of the Chinese Triads (which were like the Mafia families, only worse). He supported Chiang Kai-shek's revolution in rather nefarious ways, and that became the genesis for part of Leo's story. In fact all of the events—the fall of Budapest, the Hungarian counterfeiting scandal, the bombing of Shanghai—actually happened the way I describe them. I just inserted a fictional character." The author was asked this question: "In many ways Leo is not at all heroic. Why did you make him the main character?" and Malcolm replied: "For the same reason Margaret Mitchell made Scarlett O'Hara the heroine of Gone with the Wind. To misquote Faulkner, "sin and redemption" make for the most interesting stories. Leo doesn't have a lot of moral guidance growing up. Most of what he does as an adult is motivated by his desire to protect his wife and daughter. Like Scarlett, Leo is a survivor who has to pay a very high price to learn that deception, especially self-deception, often has unintended consequences." And hear this..."Another interesting parallel is the development of the intelligence community. I discuss the development of the Office of Secret Service, the precursor to the CIA. There was a huge amount of disorganization prior to World War II, which the OSS was created to solve. After the war, Congress split the jurisdiction of the CIA and the FBI in ways that didn't make a whole lot of sense, and here we are, fifty years later, trying to figure out how to do it better." This what Malcolm replied to the question "Do you think there are any lessons to be learned from the historical events you write about?"
SILENT LIES is pure magic. A triumph. A masterpiece. Your new passport to the enchanting, nostalgic, sinfully beautiful and melodramatically frightening world that was tailored-made to figures and characters, heroes and villains, lovers and dreamers, people larger than life who came back from Homer's' Iliad to talk to M.L. Malcolm. Get a copy of the book. Get two copies if you have two good friends.
________________________________________________________________
"Learning From the Tanya":
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, prominent authority on Jewish mysticism, offers authentic look at classic work of Kabbalah
By Amara Levine-Reich
Photo:
Rabbi Adin Even Israel Steinsaltz is a recipient of Israel's highest civilian
honor, the Israel Prize. "If the Bible is the cornerstone of Judaism, then the
Talmud is the central pillar, soaring up from the foundations and supporting
the entire spiritual and intellectual edifice. In many ways the Talmud is the
most important book in Jewish culture, the backbone of creativity and of
national life."
Amid a frenzy of New Age and pop-culture spirituality symbolized by red strings and bottled water with magical healing powers, renowned scholar, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz offers an authentic look at the ancient wisdom of the Kabbalah in his latest book, LEARNING FROM THE TANYA: Volume Two in the Definitive Commentary on the Moral and Mystical Teachings of a Classic Work of Kabbalah (Jossey-Bass: A Wiley Imprint, August 2005, $24.95 cloth, 384 pages, ISBN 0-7879-7892-2). Rabbi Steinsaltz is the author of numerous books on mysticism and Kabbalah, including the critically acclaimed Opening the Tanya, the first volume in his series of companion guides to the Tanya, and the modern classic The Thirteen Petalled Rose.
Photo:
Cover of the book "LEARNING FROM TANYA".
Learning from the Tanya offers a key for unlocking
the mysteries of one of the most extraordinary books of moral teachings ever
written. A seminal document in the study of Kabbalah, the Tanya explores and
solves the dilemmas of the human soul by arriving at the root causes of its
struggles. Though it is a classic Jewish spiritual text, the Tanya and its
commentary take a broad and comprehensive approach that is neither specific
to Judaism nor tied to a particular personality type or time or point of
view. (384 Pages)
In LEARNING FROM THE TANYA, Steinsaltz speaks to readers on all levels of familiarity with Kabbalah and provides an eye-opening and easily comprehensible line-by-line commentary on chapters 13-26 of the Tanya, a seminal work of Hasidic thought. Throughout his commentary, Steinsaltz offers many insights into basic concepts in Jewish mysticism through the use of metaphors, parables, and real-life stories of the Hasidic masters, helping him to transform an often cryptic source text into applicable life lessons and a formula for spiritual growth. In line with the goal of the Tanya itself, Rabbi Steinsaltz aims to reveal the root causes of human failings and to devise comprehensive solutions," thus directing readers in their quest for self-improvement and achieving closeness to God.
LEARNING FROM THE TANYA
LEARNING
FROM THE TANYA seeks to explain the role of humanity in the world and
their place vis-à-vis God. To that end, Steinsaltz boldly addresses
fundamental questions of spiritual existence, such as:
* What is the meaning of truth?
* How can one understand the nature of human experience?
* How does one grow closer to God when He feels so far away?
* What does it mean to serve God?
* Can one approach God without love in his/her heart?
* How does God sustain the existence of the physical world?
Photo:
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (right) and Ichil Pogranichniy, a Shargorod Jew,
converse in Yiddish, as Pogranichniy shows the Jerusalem rabbi some of the
Jewish parts of his native town.
The Tanya was written in 1797
by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, one of the most influential leaders and
scholars in the Hasidic community of White Russia (now Belarus). Steinsaltz
calls Tanya, so named for the Hebrew word meaning "it has been taught," a
"lucid and systematic articulation of the fundamentals of Hasidic
teaching." LEARNING FROM THE TANYA, along with its predecessor Opening the
Tanya, is Steinsaltz's response to a concern that much of modern society is
unprepared to tackle difficult source texts on spirituality like the Tanya.
He endeavors to bring the universal ideas of the Tanya to a level which
every human being can grasp and bring into his/her own life. The Tanya's
significance in Jewish philosophy can be primarily attributed to its main
character - the intermediate man, or beinoni. "The aim of the mussar (moral
teaching) books, and the ideal to which they strive to elevate the human
being, is the ideal of the tzaddik, 'the perfectly righteous individual,'"
he writes. "In contrast, Tanya was written for intermediates...Not everyone
can achieve [being a tzaddik], and not everyone is expected to. Instead, the
beinoni is presented as the ideal that everyone can and must attain." It is
the Tanya's realistic approach to character growth and its recognition of
natural human shortcomings that gives it the universal appeal Steinsaltz
builds upon in his commentary.
Photo
:Opening the Tanya: Discovering the Moral and
Mystical Teachings of a Classic Work of Kabbalah
Scholar, teacher, mystic, scientist, and social critic, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is regarded as one of the greatest rabbis of this century and hailed by Time as a "once-in-a-millennium scholar." In the United States, he is best known for his monumental translation and commentary on the Talmud. He has been a resident scholar at Yale University, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and the Woodrow Wilson Institute in Washington, D.C. Rabbi Steinsaltz has founded a network of educational institutions and outreach programs in the United States, Israel, Great Britain, Australia, and the former Soviet Union. He is the author of hundreds of articles and more than 60 books, including We Jews: Who Are We and What Should We Do?, which was issued by Jossey-Bass earlier this year. He has been featured on Good Morning America and National Public Radio, and in publications such as People and Newsweek. This fall, Rabbi Steinsaltz will embark on a U.S. book tour to promote LEARNING FROM THE TANYA, including public appearances in New York City, Atlanta, and Miami.
Read Column of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
___________________________________________________________________________
The
Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege. Author: Kenneth Levin, Smith and Kraus Global 599pp., $35 Reviewed by P. David HornikKenneth Levin, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a Princeton-trained historian, has written a definitive, magisterial book about what went wrong during the Oslo era. The malaise, Levin argues, was not just an Israeli one but a Jewish one, typical of both Diaspora and Zionist history in the modern era. It was strikingly evident among pre-Holocaust German Jewry, many of whom attempted to win the favor of the surrounding anti-Semitic society via self-reform, and among American Jewry during the Holocaust, many of whom did not seek to aid their European brethren out of fear that such "nationalism" would offend Americans. This Jewish pathology, in Levin's view, resembles the psychology of abused children who seek to propitiate the abuser by becoming "good" and purging themselves of their supposed failings. The syndrome often entails a "delusional grandiosity"—the idea that one can control one's environment by appeasing the aggressor. Surveying the history of the pre-modern Jewish Diaspora to find out why it was immune to this self-abasing syndrome, Levin finds the answer in the strong communal institutions that reinforced identity and pride despite hostile environments. Even among parts of Spanish Jewry that had secular educations and relatively high access to the surrounding society, the sturdy communal scaffolding prevented wide-scale defection. Similarly, much of East European Jewry showed resilience in the modern era even when religious institutions eroded, by replacing these with secular ones like Jewish labor unions and political parties. Among the Jews who led the Zionist movement, however, there were many who were scarred by Diaspora anti-Semitism and for whom Zionism meant, in part, purifying Jews of their alleged defects. Socialist Zionism sought to create a "new Jew"—a sunburned, virile laborer cleansed of the religious and bourgeois corruptions of the Diaspora. The circle of German Jewish academics surrounding Hebrew University's Martin Buber and Judah Magnes fervently opposed statehood and insisted that Judaism was strictly an ethical, universalizing mission that would win the Arabs' affection if so presented. A countervailing force was David Ben-Gurion, an energetic realist who was able to synthesize modern secularism with healthy pride in Jewish peoplehood, land and tradition. If this affirmative Ben-Gurionist nationalism basically prevailed in the first three decades of Israel's existence, there were two factors, Levin contends, that partially unraveled it. One was the persistence of the Arab siege, even after the victory of the Six Day War that to many, at the time, seemed decisive and final. The other was the triumph of Menachem Begin's Likud Party in the 1977 elections, which finally gave much of the Labor and Left sector a Jewish bête noire—in the shape of Begin's largely religious and traditional constituency—analogous to the "primitive" East European Jews whom an anxious German Jewry had once reviled and blamed for its woes. In the decade and a half leading up to Oslo, the self-blaming mentality quickly gathered steam among the sector susceptible to it.
Largely offspring of Zionist pioneers whose own Jewishness was wounded and ambivalent, lacking inner resources to cope with persistent Arab hatred and aggression, they now had the despised “Other Israel” of the Right on which to project the bewildered self-indictment that the Arab siege induced in them. As the more assertive, Ben-Gurionist trend within Labor Zionism was increasingly conflated with the Right, a school of New Historians arose who reinterpreted Zionist history to show the Jews as colonialist aggressors and the Arabs as passive victims suing for peace. Writers and artists increasingly expressed alienation and even loathing toward the Jewish state. Post-Zionist educators stripped curricula of Jewish content in hopes of producing deracinated, “universalist” Israelis whom no one would perceive as objectionable. Most significantly, and unlike in other democracies, the anti-nationalism of the elites found a wide resonance in the populace. Many Israelis, worn out by the siege, were eager to believe the peace camp's promises of an end to conflict achieved via self-reform—meaning, in this case, the relinquishment of all territorial claims, the suppression of specific Jewish-Zionist values, and the creation of a Palestinian state in whatever borders were demanded. They were enticed by the view that Arab hostility was a function of Israel's misbehavior, and thus within Israel's power to palliate.
Although the Labor Party, in winning the 1992 elections, still made the traditional Labor Zionist concerns about land and security a centerpiece of its campaign, this quickly emerged as political cynicism when Prime Minister Rabin—who had been portrayed as a holdover of the old, centrist realism—embraced the Oslo program of superdoves Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, and their comrades. The rest of the history is painful and familiar as Yasser Arafat and the PLO, perennial terrorists brought to the territories in the name of peace and reconciliation, lost no time turning them into staging grounds for brutal attacks while the Oslo camp blindly persisted in its delusions in the face of all evidence. It is a history, however, that Levin, with his consummate grasp of both the political and psychological dimensions and their interaction, traces with great eloquence and brilliance. Although not exactly picking up his earlier theme of the importance of strong communal institutions, Levin in his last chapter makes the related argument that, along with political pragmatism, the main remedy to the Oslo syndrome—the proneness to internalize the indictments of enemies and seek to prove one’s “goodness”—lies in imparting a stronger Jewish background to Israeli young people. This means “educat[ing them] in Jewish history, Jewish faith, Jewish ethics . . . , Jewish culture. . . . Educating the young in their intellectual and spiritual heritage can go far to inoculating them against the depredations of the ‘post-Zionist’ institutions they encounter as adults.” Such education should not, Levin clarifies, be “comprehended in chauvinistic terms, nor [promote] a particular strain of Jewish religious practice.” This basically sound position does not, however, anticipate two possible problems: how an adult elite that is itself infected with post-Zionism could be gotten to institute such a program; and whether it could be successfully implemented in a society that categorizes its non-Orthodox majority as “secular” and hence to some degree separate from Jewish tradition. If somewhat open-ended, Levin’s last chapter is still a thoughtful culmination of a great, indispensable book.
_____________________________________
LEEWAY COTTAGE by BETH GUTCHEON
To novelist Beth Gutcheon, the rescue of Denmark's Jews during the Nazi occupation more than 60 years ago was an inspiring but little-known story
To novelist Beth Gutcheon, the rescue of Denmark's Jews during the Nazi occupation more than 60 years ago was an inspiring but little-known story that demanded to be told. Gutcheon was astonished that so few Americans were aware that the citizens of that small country spontaneously rallied in the autumn of 1943 to hide nearly all of its 7,000 Jews and then shuttled them clandestinely to safety in Sweden. She decided to relate that story by weaving it into a novel. "I'm not a non-fiction writer," she said. "I'm not trained as a reporter or a historian, and I have spent my whole adult life becoming a storyteller. So for me that was going to be the only option." Denmark's profile in courage is the centrepiece of her latest novel, Leeway Cottage, a family saga of four generations that is set in large part at their summer colony in the fictitious town of Dundee, along the Maine coast. The story revolves around Sydney Brant, an unhappy young woman born to wealth and privilege who moves to New York to pursue a singing career and get away from her hostile and overbearing mother. She falls in love with Laurus Moss, a gifted Danish pianist. The two marry as war clouds envelop Europe. When the Second World War breaks out and the Nazis invade Denmark, Laurus' concerns about his country and his family - his mother is Jewish - lead him to England, where he helps to build a Danish Resistance movement. In her quest for historical accuracy, Gutcheon combed books and documents and spoke with Danes who experienced the occupation or had relatives in the Resistance. She spent about a week visiting the places in Denmark that she describes in the book, even though she had a familiarity with the country after working there as an au pair when she was 18. What Gutcheon discovered led her to expand her focus beyond the rescue operation to the work of the Resistance, which blew up railroad tracks, sabotaged factories helping the German war effort and smuggled downed Allied airmen to safety. "I realized that the real untold story was that the Danish Jews were all saved, but the young Danish partisans suffered by the thousands, and they suffered terribly," she said. Among them is Laurus' sister, Nina, whose capture leads to a horrific confinement in Ravensbruck, a Nazi concentration camp for women that was infamous for gruesome medical experiments conducted by the SS.
Laurus'
work with the Resistance and his siblings' experiences under the occupation lead
to a psychological gulf that develops in his marriage after the war when he
returns home to Sydney and their first child, born while he was in London.
Sydney, a woman of enormous needs and marked limitations, shows little interest
in her husband's wartime activities and displays scant sympathy for Nina, whom
she finds cold. Laurus, who values peace and contentment, understands Sydney's
good qualities and tunes out the others. While their differences might drive
them apart, their love for each other is genuine and the marriage - like that of
many like-minded couples of that era - endures. Gutcheon first learned of the
Danes' rescue of the Jews when she was 10 and watched Danish-born pianist and
humorist Victor Borge relating on television how King Christian X told Adolf
Hitler that if he ordered Jews to wear yellow armbands, he would put on one,
too, and all other Danes would follow suit. That story, although untrue, was
widely accepted, Gutcheon said, because it spoke to the character of Denmark's
people and their deep belief that all Danes should be treated equally. "It has
its power as a story because it really is essentially true," she said. What led
the Danes to take a stance unlike that of any other nation under Nazi occupation
is a question that Gutcheon has pondered. "The story about what happened in
Denmark is a mystery about character, and the mystery of the character of an
entire country," she said. She cites the influence of N.F.S. Grundtvig, a
remarkable 19th-century minister, academic and philosopher who is best known as
the father of folk high schools and a pioneer in adult education. He believed
that an essential part of being Danish is that all Danes are valued equally. "He
established that every Dane is as valuable as every other Dane," Gutcheon said,
a belief that was absorbed by Danes in the same way Americans were shaped by the
Declaration of Independence and the Bill or Rights. So when Danes are reminded
about the heroism of their countrymen, they tend to dismiss it as nothing out of
the ordinary. Although Laurus and Sydney spent most of the year in New York, and
later Connecticut, most of the narrative of Leeway Cottage takes place in
Dundee, a setting similar to where the author spends her summers and where her
own extended family has deep roots. Gutcheon's father first vacationed there in
1911. The author, who grew up in western Pennsylvania and has lived for decades
in New York City's Soho neighbourhood, said the beauty of coastal Maine is
energizing for a writer who spends much of her creative time alone. "Here,
looking out the window is enough. It just feeds you," said Gutcheon, a tall
woman with salt-pepper hair whose presence and intellect reflect her prep school
and Harvard University background. Her postmodern shingle-style home, designed
by her ex-husband, Jeffrey, who studied architecture at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, mirrors the vernacular architecture of the area and
echoes design elements of the house in which she grew up. Surrounded by woods
and a meadow strewn with wildflowers, it sits near a saltwater cove on a hilly,
forested peninsula frequented by artists and writers who occasionally rub
shoulders with local farmers and fishermen. Leeway Cottage is the second novel
that Gutcheon set in Dundee. The first, More Than You Know, was a critically
acclaimed ghost tale melded with a love story. Her next book, which she'll start
writing in September, is a sequel to Leeway Cottage and explores what happens to
Sydney and Laurus' children.
Photo:
Writer Beth Gutcheon.
Novelist Ben Cheever, a fan of Gutcheon, said Leeway Cottage is her best work, one that has the makings of a classic and is reminiscent of William Thackeray's Vanity Fair. "There's this tremendous depth," Cheever said. "The characters are all complicated and unpredictable." Even though he knew through Danish friends of what the Danes had done during the war, Cheever said he was deeply moved by Gutcheon's account. One of those whom Gutcheon drew upon for advice was former soap opera star Alexandra Moltke Isles, whose father served as a courier to the Resistance. Isles, who produced and directed the 1995 documentary film, The Power of Conscience: The Danish Resistance and the Rescue of the Jews, said she was amazed at the depth of Gutcheon's research. "The details are so on target," she said. "And there were things I hadn't known." Gutcheon's earlier novels include Still Missing, which was made into the 1983 movie, and Without a Trace, about a mother's desperate search for her six-year-old son. Gutcheon wrote the screenplay. Before she became a novelist, Gutcheon was an acclaimed fibre artist who wrote successful books on quilting. While she enjoyed quilting and teaching, she tired of the travelling involved and thought she might try her hand at fiction. Her first book, The New Girls, about five young prep-school women in the 1960s, was published in 1979.
Beth Gutcheon grew up in western Pennsylvania. She attended the Sewickley Academy, Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut and Harvard College where she took an honors BA in English literature. She has spent most of her adult life in New York City, except for sojourns in San Francisco and on the coast of Maine. In 1978, she wrote the narration for a feature-length documentary on the Kirov ballet school, The Children of Theatre Street, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and she has made her living fulltime as a storyteller (novelist and sometime screenwriter) since then. Her novels have been translated into fourteen languages, if you count the pirate Chinese edition of Still Missing, plus large print and audio format. Still Missing was made into a feature film called Without a Trace, and also published in a Reader’s Digest Condensed version which particularly pleased her mother. By Jerry Karkawi.
_____________________________________
NEWS
Book Reception for Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays
Awards & Events: Book Reception for Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays - The Drama Book Shop, New York, NY. Book Launch, Reading and Reception. Tuesday, February 21, 2006 6:00 pm at The Drama Book Shop , 250 West 40th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues.
The National Foundation for Jewish Culture is pleased to invite you to a reception in honor of the publication of Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays, an anthology co-edited by Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnick.
On Tuesday, February 21, 2006 at 6 pm,
please join Ellen and Michael, along with five of the featured playwrights -
Marilyn Felt, Nora Glickman, Jennifer Maisel, Jeffrey Sweet, and Elise
Thoron - for an evening of play readings, a reception and book signing.
All plays
in this collection were commissioned by The National Foundation for Jewish
Culture’s New Play Commissions in Jewish Theater. Since its inception in
1994, the New Play Commissions has contributed support to the development of
more than seventy-five new works for the theater. Schiff and Posnick
selected the works in Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays from numerous
commission winners that have had full productions.
This event is free but has limited seating, please RSVP by calling Mary
Hastings, Director of Special Events at (212) 629-0500 x209 or
mhastings@jewishculture.org.
________________________________________________________________
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF JEWS IN EASTERN EUROPE How did the different
dialects of Yiddish develop? What made Eastern European Jews so susceptible
to messianic movements? What does the term “Klezmer” really mean? These are
just a few of the questions that are being answered in the YIVO
Encyclopedia of the Jews in Eastern Europe, a two-tome work that is in
progress at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Lower Manhattan. The
preparation of the profusely illustrated two-million-word encyclopedia,
which began in 2000, has passed the halfway point. It is to be published by
YIVO and Yale University Press in 2008. “We commissioned 1,800 articles,
most of which have already been submitted,” said Encyclopedia
Editor-in-Chief Professor Gershon David Hundert, who also chairs the
Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University in Montreal. “It is an
unprecedented attempt to recover and present Eastern European Jewish
Civilization that ceased to exists in World War II.” The project taps 400
contributors and 30 editors from 15 countries. Each contributor is an
acknowledged expert in the field about which his/her article is being
written. Following submission, each article is checked for accuracy by at
least two experts then edited by Professor Hundert and his staff. Besides
dealing with weighty issues such as shtetl life, the Holocaust and
Jewish life-cycle events, the encyclopedia will also focus on popular
culture, with articles on riddles, cinema, folk songs, marriage customs and
Klezmer music—the term “Klezmer” is derived from the Hebrew words Klei
Zemer, which translates as “vessels of song,” an Eastern European Jewish
way of referring to musicians. The projected cost of the project is $4
million, which is being provided in part by the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, The
Righteous Persons Foundation, the Charles H. Revson Foundation and private
contributors. The encyclopedia will be issued in print format and will also
be freely available on the Internet. Professor Hundert predicts that the
encyclopedia will be enormously popular. “It is about the ancestors of the
vast majority of the Jews in the United States and about half of those in
Israel. And, unless you have Yiddish, most of the information is
inaccessible to you.” The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is the
preeminent institution for the study of East European Jewish and Yiddish
language, literature and folklore. Contacts: Linda Harris,
lharris@yivo.cjh.org,
Telephone: 212 246 6080 ext. 6108
____________________________
Israel's National
Resilience: The Influence of the Second Intifada on
Israeli Society
A new memorandum Israel's National Resilience: The Influence of the Second
Intifada on Israeli Society, by Meir Elran, published by the Jaffee Center for
Strategic Studies. This study examines the major effects on Israeli society of
severe terror attacks, mainly suicide attacks launched in populated areas in
large cities during the four years of the second Palestinian intifada. Did this
terror offensive succeed in impacting on what is known as the "endurance
capability" or the "national resilience" of Israeli society, and if so, to what
extent? To what degree did it bring about substantive changes in the routine and
the perceptions of the Israeli public? Did this terror offensive result in
changed political views of the Israeli public concerning issues related to the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict? The study's findings point to three
principal characteristics connected with the resilience of Israeli society:
stability, flexibility, and optimism. The terror offensive did not unseat the
Israeli public's prior attitudes and accepted patterns of behavior. Similarly,
it did not puncture the majority consensus regarding the manner of confronting
the Palestinians, nor did it spawn, at least not directly, any new attitudes
within the Israeli public over issues at the base of the conflict with the
Palestinians. The study documents that Israeli society displayed considerable
survival capacity and stamina in its impressive capacity to withstand four years
of a high-casualty bitter security confrontation. This serves as a lesson to
those who repeatedly issue threats that Israeli society will collapse if faced
with further challenges in the future. Furthermore, the study testifies to the
importance of including societal elements when examining the overall strategic
balance in the Middle East.- By M. Grundman
Beat goes on for Ginsberg's Howl
Photo:
Poet Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco.
SAN FRANCISCO- In the years after he wrote Howl, Allen Ginsberg alternately described the poem as a song of spiritual liberation, a homage to art, an ode to gay love and a lament for his mentally ill mother. The Beat poet who defined his times with the salvo, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," gave perhaps the most adroit explanation, however, upon publication of the original facsimile edition of the tour de force that had launched his career more than three decades earlier. Howl, he advised readers in his preface, was meant to be an "emotional time bomb that would continue exploding." With nearly one million copies in print, it is one of the most widely read poems of the 20th century. Still, critics disagree about the place Ginsberg's best-known work holds in American letters. But even its detractors acknowledge that his provocative assault on the Cold War and conformity roared across the cultural landscape in a way that continues to resonate a half-century after its storied debut at a San Francisco art gallery. Ginsberg first publicly read Howl as a work-in-progress at a wine-soaked gathering on Oct. 7, 1955 - a date that holds as much meaning for followers of the Beats as Bloomsday, June 16, does for fans of James Joyce's Ulysses. The Six Gallery reading, as it has since become known, preceded by a year the poem's publication and the moral outrage provoked by its defence of homosexuality and drug use. Admirers regard the reading as a turning point that took poetry out of the Ivory Tower - creating space for dissent and presaging the youthful rebellion that inspired folk music, sexually explicit performance art and more recently, poetry slams. "Poets now read all over the place, but at that time they didn't - if they were famous, they maybe read at the Museum of Modern Art," said Jonah Raskin, author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. At 29, relatively new to San Francisco and bearing the psychic scars that had landed him in two mental hospitals, Ginsberg was the last and least-known in the five-poet lineup. As legend has it, his raw, intensely personal evocation of desperate souls "who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts" stole the night. His friend, novelist Jack Kerouac, was in the audience of about 150 at the performance. "Scores of people stood around the darkened gallery straining to hear every word," Kerouac recalled afterward. "Everyone was yelling, 'Go! Go! Go!' " Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore, also heard Ginsberg read that night.
The
next day, he sent Ginsberg a telegram asking to see the manuscript of what was
then Part 1 of what would grow to a three-part epic. "I greet you at the
beginning of a great career," Ferlinghetti wrote, intentionally echoing a line
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Walt Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass. While
Howl and Other Poems was being prepared for publication, Ginsberg and other
Beat poets took their show on the road, performing up and down the West Coast.
It wasn't until spring 1957, after San Francisco police arrested Ferlinghetti
and the manager of City Lights, Shigeyoshi Murao, on charges of selling
obscene material, that the book became a symbol of the social tensions
Ginsberg sought to expose. With help from the American Civil Liberties Union,
they were acquitted after a highly publicized trial, and the judge's ruling
established a legal standard for publishing controversial books of "redeeming
social importance." Judge Clayton Horn agreed with the defence that the
section of the poem Ginsberg read at Six Gallery "presents a picture of a
nightmare world." Members of the Academy of American Poets still debate
whether Howl has only had legs because of its early notoriety, but there is no
denying its "profound influence on the course of American poetry," said Tree
Swenson, the academy's executive director. Last weekend, more than 400 people
crowded into the San Francisco Public Library auditorium to hear actor Peter
Coyote and seven poets recite Howl to the accompaniment of a jazz duo.
Stanford University, home to Ginsberg's papers, is holding five Beat Mondays
with lectures about the poem. City Lights will publish a fully annotated
Golden Anniversary edition of Howl and Other Poems next year. Farrar Straus &
Giroux is preparing a collection of essays by writers such as Andrei Codrescu,
Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody and Robert Pinsky
called The Poem That Changed America. A feature-length documentary, Howl: The
Movie, is also in the works.
Ginsberg died in 1997 at age 70, eight days after he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. A tireless promoter of his own work who enjoyed performing publicly until the end of his life, he would no doubt enjoy the attention Howl still generates and be the first to point out its continued relevance in an America struggling with terrorism and the war in Iraq. "We are in an era where censorship is creeping back in through the Patriot Act and where people are . . . being intimidated not to speak about what we should be speaking about," said Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. "If you substitute terrorism for communism, we are getting the same rhetoric." By Lisa Lef
Potter
sales surpass 300 million: agent
Photo: A stockkeeper packs the German edition of J.K. Rowling's sixth fantasy book 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' in the amazon.de logistics store in Bad Hersfeld, western Germany, recently.
LONDON- Global sales of Harry Potter books have surpassed 300 million, the agent for author J.K. Rowling said Tuesday. Agent Christopher Little said the series reached the milestone following the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth volume about the schoolboy wizard. Potter books have now been translated into 63 languages, most recently Farsi.
LOVING RABBI KLEINMAN” BY GARY MORGENSTEIN
Review by Ilil Arbel, Ph.D.
You may be familiar with Gary Morgenstein’s other novels, and also with his plays. All his readers know that his work is always engaging, interesting, and thought provoking, but Loving Rabbi Kleinman is undoubtedly his best work. The humor and light, easygoing style are deceptive, since the book has many levels, intriguing nuances, and true depth of feeling. The core of the book is the search for a new life, for love, perhaps even for redemption. Joss Katz, the protagonist, is a lovable character dealing with intense changes, including divorce at the awkward age of fifty-two, the loss of work, and adaptation to a whole new way of life. Joss suffers a great deal, feels sorry for himself, and makes the kind of mistakes most men would, but Morgenstein’s sense of humor gives him dignity and style. Joss never becomes the typical, somewhat pathetic Jewish anti-hero seen in so many books and movies since the 1960s. He is his own original and believable self.
The three love themes in the book are fascinating. Of course, the success of the affair with the beautiful, brilliant, emotionally wounded Rabbi Thalia Kleinman is the one the reader will be hoping for. With many other writers Thalia, seemingly the Holy Grail of magnificent womanhood, might have turned out to be too good to be true. But Morgenstein is never heavy handed, and Thalia’s character is so fully developed, so human, that this danger disappears after a page or two and you accept her as a fully three dimensional, appealing and interesting person.
The second love theme is Ellen, the ex-wife. She is just as brilliantly delineated, and any reader who has gone through the ending of a long term relationship would fully identify with Joss’s inability to extricate himself. Ellen is even more complex than Thalia. The delicate negotiations, the struggle to understand and reconcile, and the heart-wrenching attempt to break the bond between two people who had once loved each other very much, is very well handled. But the best of the three love themes is the one with Mandy, Joss’s close friend. Without any gay overtones, the deep love between these two men is so touching, so convincing, that it actually steals center stage. And there is never a cliché, never a trite comment. Mandy is simply perfect. The book, while touching, is very funny. It’s the kind of book you must be careful with, if you read it on public transportation – you might find yourself bursting out laughing in public. But as you read you become more and more aware of the strong political overtones, and of some pretty controversial elements. You may or may not agree with Morgenstein’s views and political opinions – but any intelligent reader would thoroughly enjoy the complete lack of political correctness. Morgenstein’s opinions are strong, honest, and sometimes brutal. One fragment that made me stop in my tracks was “…since Jimmy comma the Jew-hater comma Carter…” I don’t know too many Jewish writers who would dare to say that, and I applaud anyone willing to take a chance with his or her audience. I do not want to spoil the plot, but I suggest you pay close attention to a character by the name of Meir. His plans and actions strangely predict much of the horror of current events, particularly as regarding Jews and Israel.
They say that men and women cannot fully understand each other, that the differences between the genders are impossible to bridge. Perhaps this is true, but if so, Loving Rabbi Kleinman can do a lot for both sides. I highly recommend it to women – men’s egos, their fear of the loss of income, prestige, and youth, their strong preoccupation with sex, including their difficulty in remaining monogamous – all that suddenly becomes clearer, easier to understand and even sympathize with. As for men – I simply cannot imagine any men not liking and identifying with Joss Katz. This is a book not to be missed.
_____________________________________
THE SECRET MULRONEY TAPES: Peter C. Newman
The Secret Mulroney Tapes
By Peter C. Newman (Random House)
Thanks
to the headlines splashed across the front pages this week by the bombshell
launch of The Secret Mulroney Tapes, we now know a great deal of what Brian
Mulroney was thinking while he was prime minister, and a lot of it isn't
pretty. He freely slags both enemies and former allies and displays a
pottymouth to shame a trailer-park boy. If this book were a TV show, it would
be prefaced with a coarse-language warning. His predecessor, Pierre Trudeau,
is defamed as a coward and a bully who nearly wrecked the country. His
eventual successor, Jean Chrétien, is branded a mean, dirty bastard. Former
Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells is rated a son-of-a-bitch. He peddles the
gossip that his immediate successor, Kim Campbell, blew the 1993 election that
wiped out the Progressive Conservative Party because she spent too much
conjugal time on the campaign trail with her boyfriend of the day. He brashly
declares himself the best Canadian prime minister since founding father John
A. Macdonald and occasionally muses that he might just be the greatest ever.
He admits to mistakes, but for the most part it was a matter of trusting the
wrong people. Lucien Bouchard most of all, and now, undoubtedly, Peter C.
Newman. What the tapes leave you wondering is what he was thinking when he
agreed to blab his darkest thoughts to Newman. In the most widely quoted
excerpts, Mulroney comes off as a vindictive, ego-bloated vulgarian, hardly
the stuff to bolster the legacy of a great statesman he craves more than
anything in his latter years. But a full reading of the book reveals it as
more than a hatchet job. Newman goes hard on Mulroney for reneging on his
promise to clean the Ottawa stables of patronage, and for his isolation behind
a wall of sycophants while in office. But he also depicts a Brian Mulroney
that his friends well know, but which eluded most Canadians: a charming,
gracious, humorous and loyal individual. He brings out the strength of
Mulroney's conviction that the failed Meech Lake constitutional project would
be a landmark of Canadian unity, and the depth of his sorrow over Bouchard's
defection to the separatists at the height of the Meech ratification showdown.
Even hardline Mulroney-haters could sympathize with his eloquent take on the
episode: "I have never known a more vulgar expression of betrayal and deceit."
In his conclusion, he praises Mulroney as a pivotal figure in Canadian
history, if not the best prime minister ever, then certainly an activist
national leader courageously given to bold initiatives, like the free-trade
agreement and the goods and services tax, that positioned the country for
entry into the 21st century.
The book is enhanced by further interviews, some as brutally frank, with dozens of Mulroney intimates and contemporaries. Former Ontario premier David Peterson calls him a pathological liar. Mila Mulroney disses Trudeau as "this short little ugly man." The book is unlikely to change many opinions of Mulroney. The many who still loathe him a dozen years out of office will have their judgment reinforced. His friends and supporters will not be surprised -- it was no secret that he was obsessed with Trudeau, despised Chretien and Clyde Wells, cussed like a sailor in private and held himself in overweening esteem. The Secret Mulroney Tapes is a remarkable book, no matter what anyone thinks of its subject. Never before has a prime minister gone on record so openly and bluntly, whether or not Mulroney intended to come across as he did. It makes for a gripping read, and not just for political junkies. Reviewer: Huby Bauch
SCHOOL DAYS: Robert B. Parker
School Days
By Robert Parker (G.P. Putnam's Sons)
Police chief to Spenser: "We played it by the book. Straight down the line. By the book. And, by God, we kept a tragedy from turning into a holocaust.
Robert Parker's novels featuring a Boston private detective named Spenser got off to a slam-bang start in the 1970s. But since then, the series has grown in popularity but deteriorated in quality, the plots becoming as thin as negligees and the wisecracking detective turning into a parody of himself. It's not that Parker forgot how to write. Double Play, his fine 2004 novel about baseball, race relations and redemption, proved that he still can. But the Spenser series appeared long past saving. Occasionally, Parker would perk up enough to write a few chapters reminding us of why we liked Spenser so much in the first place, but he never got around to writing another good book. So School Days, the best Spenser novel since Early Autumn (1981) comes as a welcome surprise. This time, Parker has given his hero a case that is worthy of him: Two boys armed with four semiautomatic handguns gun down seven teachers and students in a suburban high school. The cops catch one of the boys in the act, and he rats out another, Jared Clark, who promptly confesses. Jared's grandmother hires Spenser to prove his innocence. It doesn't take long for our hero to realize Jared is guilty as charged. The best Spenser can do is dig up extenuating circumstances that could get Jared into a less unpleasant prison _ or, as Spenser puts it, "the easiest room in hell." So Spenser seeks to answer two questions: How did two suburban kids get their hands on semiautomatics? And why did they go on a killing rampage? Aside from the prosecutor, a good guy who cares as much about justice as his conviction record, no one is much interested in helping Spenser find the answers _ not the school officials, or the local police, or Jared's lawyer or even his parents. They all just want to forget and move on. Or are they hiding something?
The more they stonewall, the harder Spenser digs.
Before long, the digging gets a couple of kids killed, one by Spenser's hand, prompting a bit of characteristic Spenser soul-searching: "When I eventually figured out why Jared shot up his school, what would I have? The truth? Was that worth two bodies? The world had probably lost more for less. But they were alive, and now they weren't. Maybe the truth wasn't worth dying for. Or killing for. Maybe it never had been." There is a bit of bad news. Spenser's menacing friend, Hawk, one of the more appealing characters in modern crime fiction, fails to make an appearance, even though there were several moments when Spenser could have used his help. But Parker more than makes up for this by sending Spenser's insufferably precious girlfriend, psychologist Susan Silverman, on an out-of-town trip. Big strong Spenser whimpers his love to her over the telephone and she returns to leap into his arms in a superfluous final chapter, but we are thankfully spared the streams of Silverman psychobabble that have marred so many other Spenser novels. Throughout, Spenser is, as always, a smart mouth, or, as his elderly client puts it, "a wisenheimer." Police chief to Spenser: "We played it by the book. Straight down the line. By the book. And, by God, we kept a tragedy from turning into a holocaust." Reviewer: B. Silva
____________________________________
IT'S NOT MY FAULT: DANIEL WAINTRUP
Review by
Maximillien de Lafayette
An intelligently hilarious and refreshing bouquet of passages of
life of a Jewish tennis celebrity, cultivated and well depicted in a
book written by a son of a rabbi, an entrepreneur and talented
story-teller. Although, the book is a rainbow of jokes, its author
tenderly imbibed it with wit, tragicomic wisdom and heart felt
expressions. Most certainly, country clubs members, tennis players and
Waintrup's father enjoyed the stories told in the book and Waintrup's
entertaining style. But this is the beginning of the enjoyment, for the
"humanistic" humour, and delightful narrative style of "It's Not My Fault"
will appeal to a wider and multi-layered audience, Jews and non-Jews,
tennis lovers and Mercedes owners, martini mixers, Bernard Shaw's fanatics
and Donald Trump's groupies. "It's Not My Fault" is fun,
fun, fun....and entertainingly informative. The book is an umbrella for a
stormy weather and a rod in an arid Sahara. It encompasses various and
unexpected portraiture of life, usually un-depicted on the tennis court,
such as growing up in a rabbi's house, getting paid to play tennis,
celebrity correspondence, mingling with pretty girls on" the set",
the ex-wife who begs to differ, how old pros never die, instead,
they go to business school, a shrink's book and notebook, the art of
winning, justice or lack of justice in the world. You name it and you will
find it in Waintrup's tragicomic book. Of course, you will see the world
according to Waintrup. Waintrup has a lot of
imagination. But he candidly admits that thousands of unique, often crazy
students and friends provided him with "the inspiration for much of the
material" of his book. This is a plus. For certainly, unique and crazy
enthusiasts who believed in Waintrup could and would add an extra mile of
laughter and excitement to this most wonderful "crazy and captivating"
book. Waintrup's book is a monumental accomplishment. Get a copy or two,
if you have two good friends. ____________________________________
MORE BOOKS REVIEWS AT THE MEGA SITE OF THE WORLD JEWISH NEWS AGENCY
A HUNDRED YEARS, A MILLION LAUGHS" BY BARRY DOUGHERTY.
Friars Club History a Perfect Father’s Day Gift
Photo:
Author Barry Dougherty.
The world-famous Friars Club thrives as one of the most beloved and exclusive entertainment organizations in the world. In celebration of the Friars Club's centennial anniversary, A HUNDRED YEARS, A MILLION LAUGHS (Emmis Books, $30.00, June 2004) flings open the doors to the famously secretive organization's "monastery" in midtown Manhattan and offers a front-row seat at legendary Friars Club Roasts, testimonials, Frolics, and other history-making antics. This hardcover coffee-table book by official Friars Club author Barry Dougherty tells the story of the organization through interviews, timeless Al Hirschfeld caricatures, and nearly 200 photos, many released to the public for the first time in this book. The wry, self-deprecating foreword by Richard Lewis sets the tone. Starting with the club's humble beginnings in 1904, Dougherty reveals the group's ups and downs through the '30s and '40s, its golden age in the '50s and '60s, and its importance today to a new generation of comics and entertainers. A roll call of Friars Club membership reads like a who's who of American entertainment in the twentieth century: George M. Cohan, Enrico Caruso, Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Carol Burnett, Robin Williams, Barbara Walters, Billy Crystal, Drew Carey, Joy Behar. A HUNDRED YEARS, A MILLION LAUGHS captures many of the world's favorite comedians in rare form as they perform for their peers. From ribald comedy to musical merrymaking, show biz giants come clean with behind-the-scenes tales of what happens behind closed doors.
A
HUNDRED YEARS, A MILLION LAUGHS is a must-have for fans of twentieth
century American humor, show biz, and pop culture history, and a perfect
father's day gift, sure to bring back fond memories of favorite
entertainers. Barry Dougherty is the editor of the Friars Club magazine,
The Epistle. He has written and edited a number of books including How to
Do It Standing Up and The Friars Club Book of Roasts and has written
articles that have appeared in the New York Times and Newsday. He lives in
New York City.
Barry Dougherty is the author of How To Do It Standing Up, The Friars Club's Guide To Being A Comic, A Cut-Up, A Card, Or A Clown (Black Dog & Leventhal, October 2002) which explains how to be a stand-up comic with insight from comedians themselves. Culled from his interviews with thirty five comedians and comedy club owners/managers such as Lily Tomlin, Howie Mandel, David Brenner, Phyllis Diller, Joy Behar, and Shecky Greene, Barry allows them to tell their owns tales--their first time, their worst time, how they put their acts together and, best of all, tips for the up-and-comer. He is also the author of New York Friars Club Book of Roasts: The Wittiest, Most Hilarious, and Most Unprintable Moments From The Friars Club (M. Evans, October 2000). The book is a hysterical composite of the famous Friars Club's devilish Dinners and ribald Roasts. Sifting through the Club's private archives; along with his interviews with such celebrities as Jason Alexander, Milton Berle, Red Buttons, Carol Burnett, Dick Cavett, Alan King, Ed McMahon, David Hyde Pierce, Freddie Roman, and Jerry Stiller-Barry put together a hysterical historical compendium of one of the premier entertainment organizations in the world. Barry wrote and edited the popular The Friars Club Bible of Jokes, Pokes, Roasts, And Toasts and edited The Friars Club Encyclopedia of Jokes (both Black Dog & Leventhal). Barry is the Editor of the Friars Club's magazine, the Epistle. Since 1991 he has been covering the Friars events-from Roasts and Dinners to in-house activities and Friars Frolics. Along with his reporting on Club events he has also profiled Friar celebrities Ernest Borgnine, Bob Costas, Michael Feinstein, Steve Lawrence, Jerry Orbach, Sally Jessy Raphael, Rob Reiner, Geraldo Rivera, and Joan Rivers, to name a few. Other miscellaneous articles in the Epistle include a story on Barbara Walters' ABC morning show, The View, as well as his investigative first-hand experiences of being an extra on television shows. During his tenure at the Friars Club Barry has also written jokes for Roasts and speeches for Testimonial Dinners. He has produced several events for the Friars, some of which include author book signing parties, movie screenings, and a huge party to celebrate the final episode of Seinfeld-the party was covered in Variety. A former television news reporter for Cablevision Systems, Barry has also written numerous humor articles for various magazines and newspapers such as Update magazine, Newsday, and The New York Times.
_________________________________________
Direct Descendant of Legendary Jewish Figures Achieves Unique Entrepreneurial Success
Photo:
Renee Mazer’s CD Booklet.
SAT tutor for over 15 years and founder of High Score, a test prep company, Wharton Law School graduate Renee Mazer creates the highly awarded Not Too Scary Vocabulary! For the SAT & Other Standardized Tests And Success in Life - Great for Adults Too! An outrageously wild, funny guide for improving your chances in the word game - replete with wacky songs and poems! Renee Mazer, a Mensa member, has been an SAT tutor for 15 years. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton and Law Schools and founder of High Score, a test prep company. She was also an attorney for the EPA, a college admissions counselor, and a college professor. She resides with her sons in the Philadelphia area. Not Too Scary Vocabulary is available at all Barnes & Noble stores, and at online bookselling sites.
Renee Mazer is simply “GENIUS”. Should we call her the prophetess of vocabulary? You bet!. This is what Mazer said about her most innovative and brilliant technique. "Teens have a pretty short attention span these days," says Mazer. "They see more action in two minutes of video games than two hours of school. You better hold their interest and speak their language. I talk to teens in teen-speak about the real subjects on their mind: sex, dating, music, relationships, and celebrities. I capitalize on kids' interest, while engaging scientifically based memory mechanisms: linking, mnemonics, alliteration and rhyme." What did she invent? What did she develop? The answer is not so easy, for it encompasses invention, linguistic virtuosity, pragmatism and vocabulary enhancement. Mazer came up with a remarkable educational, cultural and vocabulary product-tool: A 7 CD Booklet set called “Not Too Scary Vocabulary”. This outstanding learning and training gadget-stimulus will make you change the way you used to utilize to understand and explore the frightening world of SAT and scared standardized tests. It is fun, refreshing, practical, informative and very very effective- Maximillien de Lafayette.
Photo:
Dr. Renee Mazer.
Renee Mazer, the developer of a wildly popular vocabulary enhancement and SAT prep tool, has a lineage which includes some of the most revered Jewish figures in history. Her Not Too Scary Vocabulary CD SAT test prep and vocabulary-building product is unique, and this, combined with her fascinating background make for a unique entrepreneurial or feature story. Mazer is a direct descendant of Rabbi Leib Sarah's, who was held in high esteem by the Baal Shem Tov. One of the "hidden tzaddikim," he spent his life wandering from place to place to raise money for the ransoming of imprisoned Jews and the support of other hidden tzaddikim. Mazer is also a direct descendant of Levi Yitzhak, one of the most famous personalities of the third generation of hasidim. A disciple of Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezhirech, Levi Yitzchak brought hasidism to Poland and was a major figure in the debates and power struggles between the hasidim and their opponents, the mitnagdim. Mazer, her background and product could make for an interesting story for your readers. Her product has sold thousands of copies, and her intelligence, personality and engaging style have made a popular talk show guest. What high school kid gets excited to delve into a giant SAT review book? With mp3s, portable CD players, or I-Pods competing for their attention, there’s virtually no chance of winning the attention span battle. Quite frankly, preparing for standardized tests is boring– just ask the kid – then ask the experts. But what happens when you hand teens a CD with catchy tunes, wacky poems, and off color anecdotes designed to expand vocabulary? One test prep expert says the answer is clear: They learn … and remember. Renee Mazer, a test prep expert with more than 17 years of tutoring experience, is the creator of a CD collection that helps students prepare for the SAT’s, GRE’s and other standardized tests, and enables anyone to expand their vocabulary. The Not Too Scary Vocabulary is a series of seven CDs with a 36 page companion booklet filled with amusing examples, original poems and songs to help students remember more than 500 words most often on standardized tests. Mazer’s teaching method may be scientifically-based, but it’s also premised on the fact that meaningful, relevant, and contextual examples are the best way to enhance memory. In the case of teenagers, this means situational examples and ‘real life’ scenarios to which they can relate. “The problem is that kids just don’t want to study vocabulary; they find it boring,” says Mazer. “I bring the vocabulary to them in a friendly, familiar way. If it makes them laugh and smile, the chances they’ll remember it increases exponentially.” “Studies have proven that mnemonic methods, such as music jingles, rhymes and associative techniques are much more effective than rote memorization,” adds Mazer. “Some of the material in Not Too Scary is corny and irreverent, but it keeps the kids interested, and more importantly, it makes them remember.” Mazer’s poems and songs include talk of typical high school angst, problematic dating and striving for popularity. “It’s all about bringing learning and memory into their world,” notes Mazer, “not forcing them to learn in a sterile, inanimate way.” Mazer got the idea for the program when a student was taking a trip and asked her to record her vocabulary tutoring lesson so she and a friend could listen to it as they visited colleges. Mazer introduced the CD’s through High Score, the test prep company she founded in 2001, and has updated the set for the much-talked-about “new SAT.” Since the launch, Mazer has been inundated with emails from happy students, who have seen their verbal scores jump 70 to 150 points after utilizing the CD set. Not To Too Scary Vocabulary has received rave reviews from parents – along with a few who were shocked at some content -- and Media & Methods Magazine -- which is referenced by 60,000 key educators, decision makers and buyers in K-12 nationwide -- gave it the Innovative Test Prep kit award. Mike Szymanski wrote: It's truly not too scary to start learning more words and adding them to your vocabulary. And, it doesn't matter if you're an elementary school student, a high school student studying for the SATs, a college student or an old seasoned journalist, there's no doubt you'll learn something in the CD set of "Not Too Scary Vocabulary!" by Renee Mazer
___________________________________
How to Be Bad
By David Bowker (St. Martin's Griffin)
It's the rare book that the reader puts down simply because, like a favourite dessert, it's so enjoyable he wants to save some for later. Such a book is British author David Bowker's How to Be Bad, a mystery in the weird tradition of Carl Hiaasen, full of colourful characters and crackling dialogue. From page 1, Bowker plunges the reader into a zany world when mild-mannered Mark Madden, owner of a bookstore, is approached by a man who asks to see his "most horrible book." From there, Mark enters into a sort of twilight zone. He is madly in love with Caro Sewell. They were a couple when he was 18, but she dumped him for a teacher. Caro promises to rekindle her passion for Mark in return for a favour. Knowing Mark's habit of writing lists, she gives him one with the names of the people she wants killed: her father, and two former lovers, one of whom is the bully who asked to see Mark's "most horrible" book. When corpses start piling up, Caro does again fall in love with Mark. She thinks he is a killing machine eager to please her, but that isn't quite the case. The reader will discover how chance plays with the characters in How To Be Bad. Bowker has a wonderful imagination and the ability to draw characters who start as stereotypes but end as human beings. This applies to Mark, although he should have been at least 10 years older (he's in his 20s) to be more plausible; and to Caro, who, after killing a woman, informs Mark that she is pregnant but didn't tell him sooner because she was "waiting for a special occasion." The story even has a happy ending of sorts. Caro and Mark take shelter in Switzerland, "the traditional refuge for rich scoundrels with ugly secrets." And while Caro seems to be in love with Mark, his interest in her has waned. As Mark explains, "You don't chase possessions when you're self-possessed." In the end, Mark, who has been the casual observer of murders, accidents and suicides, has learned only one thing from the experience: "I derive deep and lasting satisfaction from the deaths of people I don't like." By Mario Schizman.