Word: orphan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when Aharon Appelfeld was nine years old, he managed to escape from a labor camp in the Rumanian-occupied Ukraine. He was in effect already an orphan; his mother had been killed by the Nazis, and his father failed to escape with him. For two years the boy wandered the inhospitable countryside, working as a shepherd, fleeing human contact. "I knew that if the peasants discovered I was Jewish, they would kill me," he later recalled...
Paul Cowan's An Orphan in History: Retrieving a Jewish Legacy does not shrink from these deep-seated questions as it chronicles the author's voyage of self-discovery, which took him searching through the late 60s civil rights movements, the Catholic left, and a Peace Corps mission to Ecuador before landing him in a neighborhood synagogue on New York City's West Side. Cowan, for many years a reporter for the Village Voice, makes no bones about the anxiety and ambivalence he faced after starting to flirt in earnest with his Jewish roofs, and with the possibility of resuming...
...thought about that creed, which had shaped me too, I became convinced that my own need to understand my past, to cease feeling like an orphan in history, to overcome my recurrent feeling that I was an outsider wherever I went, was so deep that I had to find some version of the cohesive, communal Judaism that my father was beginning to rediscover [at his death...
Though Cowan expresses wonder at each step of these changes, the great strength of An Orphan in History is his refusal to sound defensive or self-conscious about regaining his faith. The joy and conviction with which he writes are evident...
Richard Hart, President American Orphan Drug Inc Greenwich, Conn...