A vivid narrative of faith, but, by its very nature, limited in scope and appeal.
Israeli novelist Sabato (Aleppo Tales, 2004, etc.) portrays a simple man living an uneventful life of piety.
Ezra Siman Tov’s twilight years are explicated in chapters that combine small stories, parables and religious text with tedious lists of the day’s routines, most of which are devoted to religious practice. Ezra works in a laundry, but his life is devoted to God. He spends every spare moment at the synagogue or in private prayer, reciting psalms or studying ethical teachings. Although he honors his wife and children, this is a story of a man and his maker, not a man and his family. Ezra is praised by the good people of Jerusalem for his kindness, and indeed the stories he is famous for are all tales of the joy he derives from worship. The city’s Great Writer is his friend and comes to depend on him for narrative inspiration. Ezra’s brother-in-law, Dr. Tawil, a pompous scholar of medieval verse, is eventually humbled by Ezra’s wisdom. Yeshiva student Moishe Dovid, who is in the habit of chastising the uneducated Ezra, begins to see the worth of his genuine, undecorated piety. The pleasure Ezra enjoys from living in the sheltering faith of God is acknowledged by all, but will change as the city begins to chip away at the things he loves. When the laundry must close to make way for a broader street and a shopping center, Ezra feels that at last he will have enough time to study the Torah in depth. Then his beloved rabbi and mentor dies. Services are discontinued at his synagogue; classes are canceled at another to make way for more contemporary ideas. An office building is raised next to his apartment, blocking the sunlight to his once-flowering veranda. The old way of life, Ezra’s Jerusalem of tireless devotion, is being brushed aside by a more secular modernity.
A vivid narrative of faith, but, by its very nature, limited in scope and appeal.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59264-140-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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