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

by Adam Kirsch

Book Overview

Following The People and the Books, which "covers more than 2,500 years of highly variegated Jewish cultural expression" (Robert Alter, New York Times Book Review), poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch now turns to the story of modern Jewish literature. From the vast emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe to the Holocaust to the creation of Israel, the twentieth century transformed Jewish life. The same was true of Jewish writing: the novels,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393652408
• ISBN13: 9780393652406
• Release Date: October 2020
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

An intelligent literary tour of the Jewish spirit in the 20th 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.