The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century

If Jews are the only people who relate to their God primarily in and through human history, Adam Kirsch's book raises the question, what has that people been doing in the century just past? For answers, Kirsch turns to the thing he knows best: writing. Going from European Jewish writers before World War II, such as Franz Kafka and Arthur Schnitzler, to writers who lived through the Holocaust like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, to American Jewish Writers like Saul Bellow and Cynthia Ozick, to an array of stellar Israelis (all well recognized though met for the first time by this reader) and winding up with the thinkers-of-the-Ultimate like Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel (the coinage is mine since Judaism doesn't invite theologians) Kirsch is truthful, insightful, sensitive and morally serious. It doesn't get much better than that. One reads with appreciative pleasure a critic who can make sense of a many-layered world.